


always the light falls

by foxbones



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/F, Magic Baby Fic, also the aladdin crew but remixed!, come for the magical baby stay for the flying snakes the size of a house, high fantasy malarkey, literal inexplicable madness, norse mythology because why not, oh and also a fantastical version of al-andalus, pure madness!, the frozen arc as it could have been, with fucking vikings and shieldmaidens and shit!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2018-08-17 13:03:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 53,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8145010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxbones/pseuds/foxbones
Summary: "I do not know your daughter’s name. In our tongue, we call her the shatterer of spears, the walker between two worlds.”“Look, this is all very Game of Thrones, but I really don’t think--”“She is born of the queen in your world. Or, she will be. In the coming summer, before the blood runs over the moon.” Anna pauses, seems to be waiting for Emma to catch up. “Do you understand now?”And it’s all sort of hitting Emma, like a train or a bus or a freezing tide of Viking entrails.  or, a reimagining of the frozen arc, the aladdin arc, and a technically-magical-baby-fic.





	1. i. seiðr

**Author's Note:**

> y'all among you know who is responsible for this madness. good luck living with yourself now that you've unleashed this behemoth on the world.
> 
> that is why there is a magical baby in this fic. the rest is madness. because ol' foxbones the masochist couldn't write a simple magical baby fic, oh no. foxbones had to research historically accurate material for viking footwear and get stuck in a blackhole of norse mythos. oh, and then we're researching al-andalus? and all of a sudden we're also doing deep research of islamic mythology so we can reimagine the aladdin arc? absolute madness, kids. absolute hecking madness.
> 
> real talk: not that the show ever had promise but i actually thought the frozen arc could have been interpreted in a really badass way if they'd reimagined the situation with vikings and actual old norse mythology and shit. i pretty much give the canon show .003% of my attention in my fanfic and pretend it doesn't exist and these characters are fan creations, but this is the one thing i really wanted to reinterpret and flesh out: the frozen arc. so here it is. and also aladdin and jasmine. and also snakes that can fly and are huge? and also there's a magical baby. but she's pretty cool. a badass. but we know where she gets that from.

 

 

 

 

It happens in a winter that should not be.

A Maine winter, a winter that seizes and stifles. A foot and a half of snow snapping limbs and obscuring roads, all of it covered in a sheet of ice, damning as a wound. Dark woods stretching into the nothingness of a grey sky, turning over into dark days, dark nights.

A lone figure makes her way through a silent forest. With each footfall, she must break through the hard crust of ice, then sink into the wet snow beneath. She is limping slightly, blood running down her hand and spotting the white powder.

She struggles for a minute, collapses onto one knee. Where her hand disappears in the snow, a scarlet smear. A shadow shifts just beyond her line of sight, the skitter of feet, a snap of brush or bone.

Something is following her. Something is coming.

Blood in the snow. Breath pooling like fog.

And then the scream, otherworldly, swallowing up the sky and the trees and the red patch of snow until nothing is left but the noise of --

 

 

 

 

“ _Emma_.”

Emma opens her eyes, sees a familiar face in the dark, a brow furrowed with concern, care. She is in bed, and there is the weight of a palm on her cheek, a body close and warm against hers. She is in a bedroom, and it is not hers, but she knows it well.

“Regina,” she breathes, and the woman smiles, strokes Emma’s temple with her thumb. 

There was a time when that name was a barb, catching and snagging on her tongue, but now it is cool and round, the sweet bite of citrus. Sometimes, when they pass on the street, when they are not alone and she is close, too close, she has to remember not to bite so easily into the name. She evens her tone, cools her expression. Avoids eye contact when she can. Certain fires create too much smoke, they say.

“You were having a nightmare,” Regina whispers.

“Sorry,” she says, rubs at her eye. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” and there’s a warm quality to Regina’s fingertip now, heat running through Emma’s forehead, filling her with a gentle sense of calm. A bit of healing magic. “I was awake.”

“You can’t sleep?” Now it’s Emma’s turn to lift a hand to the other woman’s face, push a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “That’s new.”

“Not new. You wouldn’t know, since you sleep like a literal corpse.”

Emma smirks. “A sexy corpse.”

“Don’t start.”

“What, are you uncomfortable being attracted to the dead? I feel like as an evil queen, you _must_ have had your share of weird sexual encounters with raised demons and zombified--”

“No.” Regina takes this opportunity to cover the other woman’s face with a pillow. “That’s enough, Miss Swan.”

“Sorry,” Emma says, letting her body go limp. “Hang on, lemme go back to playing dead. I know you’re into that.”

Regina rolls her eyes, snorts, but she’s rolling over to climb on top of Emma, smirking down at her. “You’re insufferable.”

“And yet you love to suffer me.” Emma can’t help grabbing the hips that are now straddling hers, digging in her thumbs. “Can’t get enough of my suffering, it seems.”

“Shh,” Regina whispers, and covers Emma’s mouth with her own.

It has been three weeks since the former queen took the savior to her bed. In eight hours, they will not be alone in this knowledge anymore.

 

 

 

 

“Is that---”

“My hand.”

“It’s...it’s glowing.”

“Is that -- is that okay? Does it hurt?”

“No. _God_ no.”

“Tell me to stop if it’s--”

“Don’t stop. Never stop.”

 

 

 

 

Outside, it begins to snow. It is September. The residents of Storybrooke stir in their beds, or gaze out the windows of their dim kitchens, blinking at the heavy flakes with disbelief. Too early even for Maine. Too early, and too quick. Unnatural.

But unnatural in Storybrooke means magic. It means curses. And when dawn comes, and the town awakens to a foot of pure white snow, a glaze of ice on the trees and the roofs and the sheen of cars, it is not the cold that makes them shiver.

 

 

 

 

Emma is walking back to the loft at 5 am, hands deep in the pockets of her jacket, boots stomping through the foot of snow still accumulating. It’s still dark, but there’s a faint glow on the horizon to her back, and she frowns at the slippery sidewalk, the strange weather. 

Her mother thinks she sleeps on the couch or the guest bed to spend time with Henry. She has yet to tell her otherwise. She’s not sure when that time will arrive, if ever. She’s not sure if --

In a split second, the ground is shifting beneath her, and she is falling. At first she thinks she has tripped on the ice, but this is different, unnatural. Time is slower, and she realizes it when she is still lurching forward, still falling as if through cold water. It should not take her this long to hit the ground. 

And somehow, inexplicably, Regina is there in the snow before her, dressed in something red, something she would have worn in another time and place, staring at her with sad eyes. 

One minute she is reaching, hand outstretched to Regina --

 

 

 

 

\-- and the next her mouth is full of saltwater.

She is laying facedown in cold sand. The tide laps at her, frothy pink. Her fingers twitch, clutch at the air. Blood is pooling in her palm. Not hers, though. There are bodies on this beach, some with long spears sprouting from their corpse, pierced mail and stained leather and --

_Ouch._

There’s a foot pushing her onto her side. Emma groans, looks up at a girl with orange hair, half of it in braids, tied with leather. There is blood in the corner of her mouth and a shield on her back. And, of course, she is scowling.

“ _Eldhúsfífl_ ,” the girl mutters, rolls her eyes. Emma doesn’t know what that means, but she assumes it wasn’t ‘ _Howdy, new friend_.’

Emma’s body is late to register the shock of freezing water, and she starts shivering uncontrollably, gasping when she pushes herself up onto her elbows. The girl is stronger than she looks, because when she grabs Emma by the back of her shirt, she’s already dragging her farther up the shore, between the bleeding corpses of warriors. Choked on her own collar, Emma sputters up more saltwater. The girl stops, waits for her to finish coughing up the salty bile, and then continues to haul her away from the water.

“Wait--” Emma starts, but the girl drops her roughly. “ _Hey_ ,” she coughs again, makes a weak swipe for the girl’s ankle. 

“Stop struggling,” the girl says. Her accent is strong, Scandinavian or German or something else northern European that Emma may or may not be familiar with via a racy arthouse film she tucked away as a teenager. Emma attempts to twist herself free again, but the girl’s grip is shockingly firm. “I am not here to harm you. Death does not come for you today, _Svanhvít_.”

Emma makes a face. “Gesundheit.”

The girl halts, looking confused. “ _Skjöldungar?_ ”

“No idea.” Emma finally hauls herself to her feet, stumbling slightly only to be caught by the quick reflex of this shield-hauling girl. “Listen, Carrots, let’s pick one language and stick to it, okay?”

The girl sighs. “Very well. Your tongue it is.”

“That’s what--” Emma groans. “Never mind. Totally wasted.”

The redhead cocks her head, narrowing her eyes at her ward. “You are not what I expected. You are...talkative for a _Valkyrja_.”

Emma stops in her tracks. “Did you say valkyrie? As in ‘Bugs Bunny in a wig’ valkyrie?”

The girl makes a face. “I thought we were only using one language. Yes, _Valkyrja_. You are _Valkyrja_. You have come from your world to ours, over _Bifröst_.” 

“Is that what happened?” Emma’s gaze sweeps up the bloody beach, the pink tide, the endless grey sea. How she went from snowy Maine to this frigid beach is still a mystery. 

“Yes,” The redhead says. “We knew you were coming, and that you would come to us in this way.”

Emma decides it’s better than to probe that particular question, opting for a more direct one. “Where are you taking me?”

The redhead adjusts the shield on her back, nods towards the rapidly growing dusk. “To my sister. She is _völva_ , wand-wed. She saw your coming, and sent me to find you.” 

“I’ll be real with you, that sounds kind of obscene. The vulva part.”

The girl makes a face, says the word slower this time. “ _Völva_.”

“Right. Still sounds like vulva. And I can only assume what being wed to a wand means.”

“In your tongue, she is...” The girl thinks for a minute. “Witch. She is a witch.”

“Great. Witches.” Emma groans, shrugs. “Well, I guess you’ll be glad to know I’ve got shit loads of experience with those.”

“She is a good witch.” She grins over her shoulder, the first smile Emma has seen out of her. “Hurry, _Svanhvít_.”

“Is that my name?”

The girl snorts. “Of course. Why would I call you by anything other than your name?”

“Swan...white? Is that what it means?”

“Swan is...bird.” The redhead flaps her arms a bit for emphasis, an entirely ridiculous gesture on a blood-spattered someone with a shield and sword. “Long neck, white as snow. Very mean.”

“That sounds about right. So your sister, who is some kind of vulva, had a vision I would wash up on this beach and what? Save the world? Fulfill a prophecy?” She sighs. “I’d say you have the wrong girl, but I’ve been through this enough times that this is kind of par for the course.”

They have left the rocky beach now, and are making their way up the dunes, into pale grass and moss-covered stones, standing as tall as a man.

“Elsa will explain more.”

“That’s your sister?”

“Yes, _Svanhvít_.”

“You can call me Emma.”

The redhead looks over her shoulder again, raises an eyebrow. “Emma?”

“Yeah, Swan Wheat’s a little too formal,” Emma says, tries a smile. She does not get a smile in return, but she does not take it personally. “What should I call you?”

“Anna,” the redhead clips, picking up the pace. “And you are not here to save the world, _Sv--_ Emma. Not my world, at least. That fate belongs to your daughter.”

Emma nearly trips. “Uh, I don’t have a daughter. I have a son, Henry. Might be a translation issue in that prophecy of yours.”

Anna stops. They are further from the sea now, but not so far that she cannot still hear the faint roar of the tide, the screams of gulls. “Yes, we know of Henry _Skáldaspillir_. I do not know your daughter’s name. In our tongue, we call her the shatterer of spears, the walker between two worlds.”

“Look, this is all very Game of Thrones, but I really don’t think--”

“She is born of the queen in your world. Or, she will be. In the coming summer, before the blood runs over the moon.” Anna pauses, seems to be waiting for Emma to catch up. “Do you understand now?”

 _But there’s just no way._ “That’s...impossible.”

“They said you would come, and you are here. They say your queen will bear you a daughter, and she will. They have never lied to us, Emma.”

“Okay, but if the queen you’re referring to is the queen I think you’re referring to, then this still doesn’t make sense. I mean, I don’t exactly have the equipment to be putting daughters inside of anybody, queen or not. That’s physically impossible.”

“It is impossible to travel from your world to mine and live. But you walk beside me.” Anna shrugs, her shield shifting on her back.

And it’s all sort of hitting Emma, like a train or a bus or a freezing tide of Viking blood and entrails. 

“Here, it is not uncommon for any two who bear magic to bear magical young. Do they not have magic in your world, _Svanhvít_?”

_Oh, shit._

 

 

 

 


	2. i. موشح

 

 

 

 

Regina is at the sink, filling a glass of water when she hears the crack - like close lightning to the untrained ear, but the sound is familiar to her, otherworldly in a way she understands. Magic.

_That probably explains the snow._

It may also explain the thrumming in every inch of her body, her skin almost vibrating with an overload of feeling, warmth spreading everywhere from fingertips to forehead. Not an uncommon sensation in the wake of what they’ve done, but never this intense. She has to steady herself against the counter, closing her eyes, whispering a few words of a spell that invokes stone and earth, meant to ground and center. Unfortunately, her magic is never as strong when self-aimed. Regina breathes out, releases her grip on the edge of the sink, and slides to the floor.

 

 

 

 

Three weeks ago, she was sitting on this same floor, her knees pulled up to her chest like a child. She’d still been wearing her coat and boots, her keys clutched in a fist. She had driven all the way from the beach, and not stopped until she was in her driveway, trying to steady her breathing.

Emma Swan, the Savior, had just kissed her. They had been arguing - what else did they do, what else did they ever do to each other except circle and ensnare and retreat from the inevitable heat - and Emma had stopped. She had apologized. She’d taken Regina’s hand, and Regina had stared down at the fingers encircling her wrist, the bare skin over her glove, and then Emma had kissed her.

The magic that had smacked her in the face then was freezing and fiery at once. First the numbing chill, a sheen of frost over hair and cheekbones, the heat of the kiss forming a cloud around their heads, and then the fire. When they’d pulled apart, there were visible sparks. Emma put a hand to her own mouth, stared at the gold flames that came away on her fingers.

“Holy shit,” the Savior had said, ever the wordsmith. 

“I have to go,” whispered the woman who had once been an Evil Queen, and clipped back to her car, unaware of her destination until she had turned into her own driveway. 

An hour later there had been a knock on her door, and a persistent Savior on her front step, eyes dancing with fire. So Regina had done what perhaps she had always known she would do - she took her to bed.

 

 

 

 

“Mom?” Someone is gently shaking her shoulder. “Mom, are you okay?”

Regina opens her eyes. She is still sitting on the kitchen floor, her back to the sink. Her son’s brow is furrowed with concern where he crouches in front of her, ever the little man, ever the boy forced to grow up too fast.

“Henry,” she breathes, tries a reassuring smile. The sun has risen behind him, the morning light on his shoulders. “I’m fine. I must have been more tired than I thought.”

“Okay,” he says, helping her to her feet, but there’s a tone in his voice that says he doesn’t quite believe her, and he’s not going to let her off this easily. “Did Ma go home?”

“I think so. Do you want some breakfast?”

“Maybe later,” he says, shrugging with an imitation of adult impatience. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I promise.”

 

 

 

 

But in the daylight, there is a layer of white ash scattered in her sheets, and ice on the windowsill. When she closes the bedroom door behind her, she can see her own breath pooling like a cloud. The scorched outline of what was two bodies intertwined last night is burnt into the pillows and mattress. 

She holds her breath, feeling the frigid air in her lungs. This is a serious magic. _Very, very serious magic._

Regina tests the air with a single finger, lit violet with a spell of inquiry. The air tenses against her touch, pushes back, and then breaks like an egg.

Henry runs into her room at the noise, yelling for her.

“Did you hear that?” he asks, eyes wide. “Are you okay?” His gaze falls on the bed, and Regina pulls back on the sheet, scattering the ash and covering the scorch marks. “What’s that?” he starts, but she’s pulling him back into the hallway, trying not to grab too tight. Trying not to let the fear take over.

“We need to find your other mother,” she says, and it’s not until they’re halfway to Snow’s that she realizes she forgot her coat.

 

 

 

 

Snow’s face crinkles immediately, and even as a child she was so quick and easy with her emotional honesty, the way she was allowed to express herself without consequence. Regina has not entirely forgotten the sourness that used to churn in her stomach when she sat on the throne and watched a little girl who was readily permitted to be herself. Jealousy, she would understand later.

“Emma?” Snow pulls back on the door, but not enough to let Regina in. “She isn’t back yet. We thought she was still at yours.”

“She left my house early this morning. Listen, it’s very important we find her--”

David’s head appears above Snow’s, and it’s his hand that finally opens the door wide enough, letting them inside. “What’s going on?” he asks, his voice holding tight to the authority of a prince, almost betraying the nervous edges of a peasant. 

“Emma’s missing,” Snow says, and Henry’s pushing past them, lifting up Emma’s things, looking around. 

And even David is probably sick of all of it, especially when he heaves his shoulders. “What is it this time?”

“There’s powerful magic here, something new,” Regina says, thinking of the scorches, the ash, the heat running through her limbs that has only recently dulled. “I need to look into it.”

“The snow,” David says quietly, nodding. “We wondered.”

“Henry will stay here with you--”

“No, mom,” Henry says, looking up from where he’s checking the pockets of Emma’s jacket. “I’m coming with you.”

“No,” Regina shakes her head once, twice. “I need you to stay here.”

“But I can--”

“I am not losing two of you today,” she says, and plants a kiss on his forehead when he comes to her side. “Stay inside, away from the windows. Keep the heat on.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Why? Is it a curse?”

“No,” she says, but it is half a lie, something she desperately wants to believe. Because whatever it is, she and Emma made it, and she doesn’t want that to be a curse. The reverse is unthinkable.

 

 

 

 

When she was a child and the magic was new, they told her there were many kinds of magic. Some ran like rivers through humans, connecting and tying, flooding and drying. Some magic was powerful and stubborn, magic that commanded kings and queens, and other magic was meant to be conquered and bent to the will of its owner. Some was young and sticky, playful and sweet. Some magic tasted of love and salt and fruit. Some magic tasted like ash and clay.

And some magic, the magic she was always told to avoid, was older than the world itself. There were no rules to this magic, or at least none that humans could understand. If it came for you, you were powerless against it. Better to give in. Better to let it move you, as destiny called.

The vault is under a foot of snow, and she pushes it out of the way with a fiery hand, unsurprised to find a layer of frost on everything inside. She needs her library, the one she wasn’t able to bring with her like so many other things, but for now, a few books may do.

It’s an hour before she finds what she’s looking for - in that time, she is reminded of old spells from her childhood, the first spells in those first hours, days when magic was taught to her with split palms that bled and switches across the backs of her legs. Always Regina is reminded that magic was taught to her in increments of suffering. Always she is reminded that pain is the first legacy of her gift.

It’s an ancient tome, one she barely remembers bringing with her. She has to heat the book slowly with careful magic - the frost has done its damage, and the pages are sticking together. Coincidental once she reads what’s inside, and sees the symbols for fire and ice over and over again, written in ancient hands, pressed into the parchment and animal skin with spells and magicked palms. Illuminations of sorcerers entwined, hands connecting, bodies twisting into each other. Cataclysms opening, rays of light painted across pages.

And although she was raised to be a queen, Regina sighs and curses in a very unladylike way. The Savior must be rubbing off on her. “ _Fuck_.”

The vault shakes slightly, a tremor dislodging dust and debris. She looks back up at the entrance behind her, hears someone yelling in the distance. The rumble of car tires, the slam of a door. Henry’s standing outside the vault, calling for her.

“Emma,” she whispers, love making her forget all she was taught about the powerful magic of names.

 

 

 

 

There’s a crowd gathered next to the forest road, the one that serves as a shortcut between the loft and Regina’s house. She feels foolish for not thinking of it before - feels foolish for a lot of things now, her limbs tingling, her insides aching when she gets out of the car.

“There’s so much blood,” someone is saying, and there’s sniffs, there’s sounds of disbelief. “Too much blood. Never would have survived it.”

“Is she dead?” someone else asks. “She must be dead. Nobody could lose that much blood and live through it.”

“The Savior can’t die.”

Regina pushes past them, stops when she sees what they’re all staring at.

A perfect crimson circle in the snow, the diameter of a grown man. Snow is nearly crying, standing a few feet away. David sees Regina, spins in place.

“Regina,” he barks, and the familiarity is gone, whatever small kindnesses they had painfully built over the past few years dissolving. “What is this?”

She steps to the circle, crouches. Her fingers are shaking again.

“It’s not blood,” she says, and when she presses her hand to the red snow, there’s an audible gasp from the crowd. The smell is familiar when she brings it to her nose, the taste on her tongue salty and earthy, the memory of what had created it. “It’s residue from a portal. Or...” The snow dissolves between her fingers, turns black. “A kind of portal.”

Snow sniffs, looks like a child again when she stares up at Regina. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure.” She kneels, stirring her hand through the residue again. It turns black in the wake of her touch, a dark streak through crimson like a brushstroke on the page. “I think this is where she went, but I don’t know how to follow her.”

Gold is at her shoulder now, speaking in low tones. “Regina,” he says, speaking in a tone of conspirators, of the only other person who might understand her at this moment. “What do you know about this?”

“It’s a long story,” she says, and the ache is back in her bones, the heat and the ice and why is it like the elements themselves are fighting for control of her body? What in every hell is this magic? She loses herself for a moment, falters, and finds herself steadied against Gold’s arm. He gives her a questioning look, then notices the frost on her fingers, the faint gold sparks.

“Oh, my. What have you gotten yourself into, Regina?” Damn him for looking almost amused by the situation. “I wonder...” he says, and the look she gives him must confirm his suspicions, begging his silence. “Well, then. You _are_ in over your head, dear. There’s a reason powerful sources of magic are not meant to converge too often.”

“What?” Snow says, her voice raised. “What is it?” She steps closer to them. “What do you know?”

Everything in her is telling her to remain silent. But everything in her is also aching, and burning, and freezing, and whatever this magic is, it’s seized her in its grip. _Better to let it move you, as destiny calls._ she remembers, and takes a deep breath.

“Emma and I...” Regina closes her eyes, massages her temple. “I’m not really sure how to say this.”

Heads are shaking, eyes are narrowing. She remembers the first day the curse had been revealed, how she had never thought she would feel that way again. 

“I didn’t think anything like this would happen. I didn’t...we didn’t think...”

Snow shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

“We are both powerful conduits for magic. When...when those two sources combine, there’s a possibility that the magic can _react_. It’s unpredictable. It can be dangerous, but...” 

But there is no dawn of understanding in the faces in the crowd, not until Gold smirks and tilts his head.

“Your Savior was bedding your Evil Queen,” he says, and Regina winces at the audible reaction. “The magical equivalent of two nuclear warheads, clanging wildly against one another.” 

“So it’s a curse,” someone says, and Regina starts shaking her head, much as she knows she cannot be sure.

“How could you,” Snow is blinking back tears, her voice breaking, her finger stretched towards the woman on the other side of the sidewalk. “You...”

Regina steps forward, hands raised as if in defense. “Snow, this isn’t--”

“ _No_ ,” Snow spins on her heel, shaking her head. “Not from you. I should have known we couldn’t trust you, not ever again. You’ve already brought this evil down on us once. ”

“It’s not evil,” Gold says, testing the air with his finger as if there is something tangible there, something true. “This is old magic. Very old magic. Older than any of us, I would suspect.” The air seems to resist him, stirs the snowflakes around his hand. “It won’t respond to me. It doesn’t seem to understand me.”

David’s hand is on his hip, though empty. “What is it, then?”

“I don’t know,” Gold says, eyes narrowed and searching, but his gaze falls on Regina, and he stops. “It understands you, though.”

Everyone is looking at her now. Not that this has ever changed. They have always been gaping at her one way or another.

“I’ll get her back,” she says, as much to reassure herself as the crowd around her.

“You don’t have a choice.” Snow nearly spits out the words, her eyes cold. “Don’t bother returning if you can’t find her. You are no longer welcome here.”

 

 

 

 

David drives her back to her house, Henry in the backseat, obviously and almost resentfully aware of the sheathed sword laying across his grandfather’s lap. 

“Is that necessary?” Henry asks, his brow furrowing with accusation, but David’s eyes are on the road, his expression unchanging.

“I’m sorry, Henry. I know it’s not nice for you to see your mother like this.”

Henry sounds like his other mother now, his tone harder. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“Henry,” Regina starts, but David interrupts.

“This is a complicated situation, Henry. You may not understand until you’re older.”

“It’s not complicated,” Henry says. “It’s _bullshit_.”

“Henry!” Regina raises her eyebrows, unable to stop the instinctive response. “Language.”

“Come on, mom! They’re taking you prisoner. If there’s ever a time to use swear words, it’s now.”

“Manners don’t stoop, Henry.” Gods, she sounds like her mother. 

Henry huffs, pouts at both of the front seat occupants through the mirror for the rest of the ride. When they finally make it to the driveway, David gets out before she can, opening her door. She sees his expression, firm, still, searches it for any sign of apology, but there is none. Once, he was a rare ally. Now she’s not sure who’s going to take her side.

Henry glares at his grandfather, standing between him and his mother. “We’re fine,” he says. “You can go home now.”

“Afraid not,” David says, and ignores his grandson. “I need to remain with your mother until they decide what to do with her.”

“This is bullshit--”

“ _Henry_.”

“Mom--”

She squeezes his hand, tries to give him a look whose meaning will pass over David. “Henry,” she says, quietly, seeing his mother in his expression, her determined jaw, her courage. “It will be okay.”

David reaches for his shoulder. “Listen Henry, it’ll all--”

“Don’t touch me.” Henry says, pulling away, glaring. “You’re not family anymore. Family doesn’t do this.”

And this is how it comes to pass that there is an armed man sitting on her couch, and a sulking preteen in the kitchen, and Regina is left to stand in the middle of it all, waiting, aching, thinking about blood-red snow.

 

 

 

 

“Banished.” She repeats the word back to Mother Superior. Regina remembers when she was Reul Ghorm, always bathed in blue light, obnoxious and haughty. Now this is the fairy meant to deliver Regina’s fate. They are sitting in the living room in the late afternoon light. Regina’s fingers keep twitching. 

“We will open a portal, and send you through it. You will find the Savior. You will not return. Effectively, the citizens of Storybrooke, formerly of the Enchanted Forest, have banished you from this realm.”

Regina stares at a point just beyond Mother Superior’s shoulder, a glint of dust floating before the window. “What will happen to Henry?”

“He will live with his mother, if you return her. If not, he’ll go to the custody of his grandparents.”

Her mind is cold, blank. Why can’t she focus on anything? Why hasn’t the fire stopped in her chest? “And I’m meant to...agree to these terms.”

David is standing just beyond the couch, hand on the hilt of his sword. “Yes,” he says. Mother Superior nods.

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.”

Another version of Regina would be quick to spit and sneer, to make her hands twin flames and tell the idiot in her sights that yes, she should be afraid. But this version is trying to live quietly, accountably, to make entire worlds in white sheets with women whose magic is as strong as her own, to make good, to make light.

She nods once. Takes a deep breath.

“I take it you understand more about the portal now. You know where you’re sending me.”

Mother Superior’s frown twists, her hands fluttering at her side. “Not exactly. We’re in the process of--”

“How long will it take?”

“We’re not sure. Mr. Gold is currently working on the portal, and the sisters. We don’t want to waste this opportunity if the Savior is still alive.”

“Emma’s alive,” David says, pacing. “Emma is still alive.” He looks at Regina, and she can’t help it, she nods at him.

“She is,” she says quietly. “After what we...I’d know. The magical bond would have already reacted.”

He looks away at this, slows his steps. Mother Superior sighs. “You are to remain here until we’re ready. Do you agree to this?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“No,” David says, and there it is, the moment when they become enemies once more. “You don’t.”

They take Henry with them, before she can say goodbye. Whatever darkness she has felt before, it will never compare to this. Never.

 

 

 

 

The portal is finished just before midnight. Regina is in her room, sitting upright in bed in the center of the scorch marks in the shape of herself and Emma, the particular shape they took the night before. Her sheets have not been changed. Occasionally something will stir in the magic around her, and the ash will scatter across her legs, in her hair. She remains still.

There’s a knock at the door, the sound of David clearing his throat.

“It’s ready,” he says, and she gets to her feet, brushes the ash from her front. Takes one last look at the bed, the beginning in the end.

 

 

 

 

The car ride is silent. David’s sword is still across his lap. Regina’s hands have been bound in front of her, gloved with a pair of magic-binding cloths that were dug out of Gold’s shop. She doesn’t have the heart to tell them that they’ll do little damage to someone of her power, but she has no intention of acting out.

“How long,” David says, his voice breaking the silence. She turns to look at him, but his eyes are on the road, his jaw set. There is no question what he’s asking.

“Three weeks,” she says. She looks at her hands, and then at the snow-covered forest, black and white, flying past in the headlights. “Not long.”

“Long enough,” he says. “I don’t need to know how it started--”

“We barely knew ourselves. It just did.”

“I just need to know why.”

She doesn’t have a response to this, at least not immediately. It would be easy to snap at him, to use the same defense of snark that has always worked on David and Snow. But there is more to him now, in the pale knuckles that grip the steering wheel, the way he uncomfortably shifts under the weight of his sword.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Was it to hurt us? Your idea of some kind of...fucked up revenge?”

She’s heard him curse so rarely that it cuts through the dark, that word. She starts, closes her hands into fists. “No,” she says. “Never. It’s not like that.”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. We were drawn to each other. I think...I think we always knew it would happen.”

David snorts, a harsh sound. “Well, the rest of us sure as hell didn’t. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of my daughter and...and the witch who tried to...well.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m sure you remember.”

She does. 

“What do you want from her?”

She blinks. “Nothing. I don’t want anything from Emma.”

“Then why do this?”

“What did you want from Snow White?”

Another angry noise from his side of the car, a sharp inhale. “Don’t you dare. This is completely different.”

“Is it? I don’t see much of a difference. Besides, Emma pursued me.”

He shakes his head. “You seduced her.”

It’s Regina’s turn to snort. “Hardly. I thought I was doing a very good job of repelling her.” A jolt of fire in her hands again, sparks lighting under the cloth, followed immediately by the sheen of ice. She is grateful for the darkness. “I had heard a long time ago about the reason why sorcerers are not meant to pursue each other. I think I had assumed it was to keep them from forming alliances. I never would have thought there was truth to it.”

“Emma’s not a sorcerer. She’s the Savior.”

“She’s a pure source of magic. She is the electric current to my bathwater, do you understand?”

“So all this that’s happening, the snow and her disappearing into some kind of portal, that’s because you two...” He is clearly reluctant to finish the sentence.

“I believe so.”

“Do you love her?”

Regina turns, tries to see David’s expression in the flicker of headlights. He is not looking at her.

“I don’t need to know,” he says before she can answer, shaking his head. The car stops. “Just get her back. Fix this.”

She nods once. Her door is opened, and she is being pulled toward the forest, led by Mother Superior. David makes eye contact with her, nods, and then looks away.

 

 

 

 

There is an open portal between two trees, its outline glowing in the mirror of the snow. Regina does her best to examine it from the current distance, checking for anomalies, for any mistakes in its creation that could be fatal, but it’s pointless now. Whatever they’ve done, she’ll have to trust in their work.

There’s a small crowd around the portal, and she gasps when she sees Henry pushing to the front. Gods help them all, they’ve underestimated the Emma in him. 

“Henry,” she breathes, and sees Snow to her right, tries to shift out of the grips at her shoulders and wrists. “Why did you bring my son here? Why would you let him see this?”

“Stand by me, Henry,” Snow says, taking a step towards him, but he’s shrugging away from her, shaking his head. 

“I’m going with her,” he says.

Regina’s eyebrows are sky high. “You most certainly will _not_ ,” she starts, but the portal’s crackling, magic sparking like lightning along its surface, and she knows that it’s already weakening, that time is running out. “Henry, don’t you _dare_ \--”

But they’re pushing her towards the portal now, untying her wrists as they shuffle her forward. Mother Superior is speaking quickly, handing her leather pouches and silk-wrapped objects that she can tell from the weight must be enchanted.

“You will be emerging on the other side in the Enchanted Forest near Hilldale. Are you familiar with this village?”

“Yes,” Regina says, but she’s still watching her son struggle in his grandfather’s grip, worry beyond belief in her limbs. “Henry, you need to stay here. Do _not_ leave, _please_ , you have to stay--”

“We believe Emma is somewhere on the Grey Coast. I’m sorry,” and the Blue Fairy that once rolled her eyes in Regina’s face has closed her hands over Regina’s. “That’s the only information we have.”

“Fine,” Regina says, and now they are at the portal, crackling just in front of her face, and there’s not enough time. She wants to hug her son, she wants to tell him she loves him and she will bring his mother back and she will always be his mother and--

“It’s closing,” someone says, and there are hands at her back, pushing her through.

Behind her, she hears “fuck you, grandpa,” and then the lightning twists everything into blinding white.

 

 

 

 

And of course the first thing she does when she hits the ground is reach for her son, forgetting that anything has changed, forgetting that they are not in their living room at home and he has just sworn at the television. “Henry Daniel Mills, why would you use that word?”

He looks up from where he’s laying on his back in the sand, grinning. “Ma says it.” He sits up, brushing the white residue of the portal from his jacket. “This doesn’t look like the Enchanted Forest.”

“We’ll address your mother’s horrible example later, and the fact you blatantly disobeyed me, which is also directly tied to your mother’s horrible example,” she says, stumbling slightly. “I don’t think that portal was--”

But there’s a stabbing pain deep in her abdomen, something trying to tear its way through her, and she falls to her knees, vomiting directly into the dune.

“Mom,” Henry cries, getting to his feet, but she holds up a hand to keep him back. The vomit is blood-red, and turns black when it hits the sand. When she finishes, she nearly collapses, rolling onto her back. Henry kneels beside her, worry all over his face.

“Was that blood?” he asks, but she shakes her head.

“I’m fine,” she says, giving him a weak smile. “Just a little portal sickness. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

 _That’s certainly never happened before._ Because it’s not just a little portal sickness. It’s not blood, either. It’s magic, in some strange, heavy form.

“We should get some water,” Henry says, shielding his face to look out at the landscape. “Except I’m not really sure where we’ll find any.”

They are sitting on the highest rise in a sea of golden sand dunes. The sky is the color of a child’s painting, a technicolor blue, blindingly bright. In the distance, the faint shimmer of a sand snake, flying above the dunes, its screech faint but audible.

Regina sighs. Somewhere in the afterlife, wherever that may be, her great-grandmother is welcoming her home.

 

 

 

 


	3. i. vǫlr

 

 

 

 

“Okay, so let me get this straight, no pun intended--” Emma thinks for a second, then makes a face, recalling the particular fantastical viking nature of her present company and said present company’s grasp on the concept of puns in the English language. “That’ll go right over your head, won’t it?”

Anna turns around mid-stride, swiping a hand above her head and shield as if expecting to catch something, and Emma snorts.

“Wow, this is going to be wild. And you haven’t seen, like, _any_ movies, right? I am going to recycle so many jokes. I’m gonna be shameless in that department, just a warning.”

“Please make sense,” the girl groans, returning to her determined trudging.

The coastal lowlands have given way to a spruce forest, dotted here and there with tall standing stones, covered in a thick layer of technicolor green moss. Many of the rocks seem to be glowing, or have lanterns at their feet, lit beside day-old flowers and bright river rocks as if they were offerings. Emma doesn’t question any of this because, well, magic forest in a magic world, and also she’s too exhausted and grateful for the light source now that the sun has gone down.

“Look, I’ve been thinking while we’ve been doing all this trudging, and I’m just trying to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

Another groan from her guide.

“Right, idioms, sorry. I just want to make sure I understand exactly what’s going on, does that make sense? Yes? I will interpret your silence as a yes.” She takes a deep breath. “So I’m here because of magic somehow, and here is some kind of...high-stakes Skyrim on steroids, and there’s a stereotypical prophecy about the end of the world and I need to be here for that event because apparently in this world I am a valkyrie? Oh, and I knocked Regina up. Because I’m just that fucking good.”

A skeptical glance over Anna’s shoulder. Emma’s grin turns into a look of feigned innocence, and the shieldmaiden snorts. Emma gives in, rolling her eyes.

“Fine, fine. Because magic. And my magical daughter is supposed to save the world someday, and I’m still not entirely sure why I need to be in high-stakes Skyrim, but I assume I will be returning to my world shortly and attending to my soon-to-be-one-more family, right?”

Silence from the shieldmaiden.

“Sorry I’m not taking this seriously, it’s just...you’re not serious, right? Like, I’m _not_ a valkyrie. I mean, granted I’m only alive today because my parents sent me to another world in a magic log, but I’m one hundred percent sure my powers have never involved Old Norse mythology.”

Still no response.

“And I know I didn’t knock Regina up. I’m pretty sure she would have made me wear some kind of...fantastical magical protection if I was capable of doing that. Actually, I’m _incredibly_ sure that’s a thing she would do. I mean, it’s been three weeks, we’re not ready for this. But it’s...I mean, it’s not a thing. I did not get her pregnant. There’s a lot of room for interpretation in this prophecy of yours, right?”

Emma clears her throat, hoping for something, anything.

“Right?” she tries again, but the girl continues to walk deeper into the forest, the lanterns more scarce here, the moon still too dim through the heavy canopy.

 _Denial is a river in Egypt,_ she hears an irritatingly accurate inner voice say, but Emma ignores this voice, because fuck that voice.

 

 

 

 

“Straight up -- again, no pun, not that you are really grasping the concept of puns right now -- I am frozen.”

And it’s true that Emma is quite literally shaking in her boots, the reality of a dark winter forest in god knows what corner of fantastical Scandinavipocalypse all too real, all too frigid, and all too unpleasant.

Anna turns, and she does look concerned, bless her, though once she’s prying at Emma’s frozen fingers and painfully rearranging them does Emma wonder if it’s for the right reasons.

“It is like you do not even know you are _valkyrja_.” She’s pushed Emma’s fingers into a specific shape, two curled, two pointing out like a saint preparing a blessing, and she steps back, gives Emma an expectant look. Emma blinks.

“Is this...are we going to do a secret handshake or something?”

Anna rolls her eyes, grabs Emma by the wrist, and moves her hand from one side to the other. “ _Bruni_ ,” she says. “Say it.”

“Is that a spell? So if I just say _bruni_ \--” And her hand immediately leaps into a white flame. It does not hurt, and it doesn’t seem to be burning at the heat of a real fire, but the second after it’s sprung to life on her fingertips, it’s spreading throughout her body and she is instantly, wonderfully warm.

“Bruni,” Anna repeats, clearly pleased with herself.

“Shit, that’s a neat trick. Quick question, though - how do I turn it off?” Emma’s shaking her hand and attempting to put out the flames, to no avail. She blows on her hand as a last ditch effort, and the flames disappear. “Oh. Did _not_ think that would work.”

 

 

 

 

After another half hour of walking, the shieldmaiden stops. A stone twice as tall as a man is leaning precariously out of the darkness, carved vaguely into the shape of a bear. Anna presses her hand to its surface, sighs, and then drops her shield onto the ground.

“You need rest,” she says to Emma, a command rather than a question. She gestures to a fallen log, and Emma is more than happy to sink into its moss-softened surface, dusted with snow. Anna goes to work on building a fire, eternally the efficient little viking.

“Are we near your sister’s place?”

The girl shakes her head, snapping a twig in half and smelling it. “No.”

“Are we, say, an hour away?”

“No.”

“Are we in the same ballpark?”

“No.”

“Same neighborhood?”

“No.”

“Do you understand anything I’m asking you?”

“No.” Though from the way Anna is looking at her, a lot of exasperation and pent-up viking done-ness, Emma is not entirely sure she believes her. This may very well be a case of willful ignorance.

The girl points upwards towards the moon, and then moves her arm like the hand of a clock. “Soon,” she says, and then pulls something out from under her tunic, a pouch on a string. Whatever its contents, they must be edible, because Anna puts a dark piece in her mouth and begins to chew. She hands the pouch to Emma. “You should eat, _Svanhvít_.”

“Thought we were ditching Swan Wheat for Emma. Keeping it casual and all that.” Emma digs into the pouch, picks out what looks like a shaving of dried meat. “Beef jerky?” She starts chewing it, tries not to frown at the overwhelmingly gamey taste. “Not quite beef jerky.”

Anna smirks from where she’s piled the sticks. “ _Hreindýri._ ”

“I am pretty sure I know what you just said, but I want to pretend I didn’t hear it.” Emma chews the minimal amount necessary to swallow, wincing as it goes down. “I hope that was one of the shitty reindeer that was mean to Rudolph. That’s the only way I’ll feel good about that.”

It’s just then that Emma happens to be stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and discovers something even more magical than the fire she made with her hands thirty minutes ago.

She pulls out the bag, shaking it a bit for the sake of showing it off. “Jackpot,” she whispers, and the shieldmaiden cocks her head. “Totally forgot I had these in here. Anna, my striking hiking viking friend, I am about to blow your mind.”

“I do not know that I can eat food meant for the _valkyrja_.”

“No, no, they’re not valkyrie food. It’s Earth food. Or, you know, _my_ Earth food. They’re M &Ms,” Emma attempts her best salesperson smile, pouring a few into her hand. “Well, technically they’re crispy M&Ms.” She takes a bite, chewing loudly for emphasis. “See? Crispy. Not as good as peanut butter, but definitely better than the normal ones.” She gestures at the girl, nodding for emphasis. “Write that down if you want, it’s an important 'my Earth' fact.”

Anna raises an eyebrow. Emma hands her an M&M. “I am meant to...eat this?”

“Trust me, you can’t resist these puppies. This’ll change your whole outlook on whatever flesh-colored mutton and gruel you folks are eating.”

Anna contemplates the candy carefully, sniffs it, and then puts it in her mouth. After exactly two chews, she makes a horrified face, and spits it halfway across the snow, which would be impressive if it weren’t completely inconceivable and also kind of insulting. Emma’s jaw drops.

“Wow. Message received.” She shakes the bag one more time, but the girl continues to stare at it as if it were a three-eyed fish. “Suit yourself, but best believe I’m having your tastebuds checked the next time you cross over to my version of the world, the one with doctors and indoor plumbing.”

And if Emma had an inner voice of responsibility, the one that could remind her that she will desperately, pathetically miss these M&Ms weeks from now when she’s on a straight diet of stewed goat and troll cheese, she would save these for later. But Emma does not have an inner voice of responsibility, so she tilts the bag back and swallows all of its contents at once.

Anna watches this, blinking in disbelief.

“That’s what my people call shotgunning,” Emma says, crumpling the empty bag with a flourish. “We also shotgun alcohol with much more exciting, drunken results. I’m sure you’re familiar with that whole situation, if the History Channel is to be believed.”

The shieldmaiden smiles knowingly. “I do not know of the great History Channel but if he has boasted of mead and ale in the halls of the gods, then he has spoken true.” She nods at the firewood. “Bruni, Emma.”

“Oh, right.” Emma attempts to make the same hand position Anna had shown her before, shoving her hand into the firewood. “ _Bruni_.”

Emma smirks at her, hoping this has at least gained the tiniest approval point with the girl, but the redhead is staring into the fire. Emma does not want to stare in the fire, because she’s afraid that all these thoughts and emotions she is attempting to bury with sordid humor and the sensation of wetness in her boots will come screaming out of those flames, and that is not something she is ready to deal with, at least not right now. Not in a dark and freezing forest in some black metal band’s music video.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s whispered “bruni” about nine more times by the time they see the lights. Anna turns to her ward, and breaks out into a wide smile.

“We are here.”

Here is a hut that seems to grow out of the forest itself - its roof is grass and moss and a small tree with red leaves, dusted with snow. Two carved beams are angled above the door, and a single reindeer antler, bleached and dry, is hanging between them, strung with bright white thread and -- what Emma notices with a slight nose wrinkle when they get close enough -- a lot of animal feet.

“Is that what happened to Dasher?” Emma quips, nodding at the antler above them, but Anna is opening the door, shoving her through, and oh, the warmth of that dim, musty room is _glorious_.

A small figure, ice-blonde hair a mess of braids, leaves, and charms, is sitting on the floor in the center of the room, weaving a series of white knots in midair with a carved wooden stick. _So I take it that’s the wand she’s wed to, which means she’s the vulva._

“Elsa,” the shieldmaiden says, nodding at Emma, and then at the...vulva.

The girl looks up from the white threads she is weaving, and she smiles at Emma. Something hits Emma in the chest like a blast of cool air, magic, she realizes, and then there’s no question that this girl is...something.

“ _Svanhvít_.”

“Emma,” Anna corrects, closing the door behind them. “She wishes to be called Emma.”

“Of course,” the witch says. “She is known as Emma Swan in her world. This is probably all very new to you, Emma. I apologize if this hasn’t been the easiest transition.”

“ _Oh_.” She was not expecting that, not at all. “You’re...fluent in English. Not that you’re too shabby either, Carrots. Not here to create language hegemonies or anything.”

“She talks too much,” the shieldmaiden says, and then mutters something else Emma can’t understand.

“ _Anna_.” Elsa shoots her sister a look, though there’s the tiniest smile playing at her lips. Anna shrugs and goes to the task of hanging her shield. “Emma, please sit.” And not about to disobey a vulva, she does.

“I feel like I should start out by saying that I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

The witch is rolling her wand between her fingers, raising an eyebrow. “Why do you think you will disappoint us?”

“Your sister was telling me about this prophecy. There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding, because you think that I’m a part of the prophecy, but--”

“It is about your daughter. The prophecy, that is.”

“Right. About that.” Emma gestures at her, er, equipment. “This is what I’m working with. Not a ton of...daughter-making bits in here. I mean, not the kind I can put in someone else without medical intervention, at least.”

Elsa smirks. “I understand. You are confused. In your world, you are not familiar with _seiðr_. It is not quite the same as our magic. More like a sister, or a cousin.” She holds up her wand, and then reaches for Emma’s wrist. “This is my wand.” She gently squeezes Emma’s hand. “This is yours. Does this make sense?”

“I mean, does your wand perform sexual acts?”

Elsa blinks. Emma smiles apologetically.

“Never mind, I think I saw a History Channel special about that, too. I just...I’m not sure, and I want to be sure, but I don’t think I’m _Svanhvít_. I’m sure that person is going to ride in all horned helmet and spears and baby-making capabilities and totally help you guys out with that end of the world thing, but--”

The witch shakes her head, feathers falling from her white hair. “You are _Svanhvít_.”

“How can we know that? And before you say it, yes, I know, _magic_. But magic isn’t the answer to everything, even if people in my life keep shoehorning it in like some lazy storytelling device.”

The vulva -- fine, _vǫlva_ \-- sighs. “Yes, I know what it is you say. I understand how difficult it can be when your life does not feel like your own, when it feels like it belongs to the whims of _seiðr_. That has been my experience.” She sets down her wand, getting to her feet. “In my world, in this place, _seiðr_ is...I do not quite know the word. When you first snap the bone of a kill, the marrow - that is _seiðr_ here. Or the blood that runs from the wound, or the green beneath the bark in spring--”

“Raw,” Emma says, breathing harder for some reason.

“Yes,” Elsa says. “The magic in this place is raw. We do not have much control. We make offerings, and if it is amused, it comes to me, to this wand. It is only appeased by blood, sex, death. That is _seiðr_. In other places, like the one you and your queen are from, there are ways of holding the magic. It is tamer. It has forgotten its own impulses, it listens to you, it obeys. I do not know its rules, but I know there are rules. Perhaps the magic in your world is content to fill the gaps that your kind tell it to fill. Here, I can only tell you that once our magic has touched you, there is no turning back. Best not to fight. Best to see where the current tosses you.”

“But that still doesn’t mean I’m--”

“Eat.” This from Anna, who has now stripped down from her armor into her tunic, revealing the fact that most of her body is covered in tattoos. She is holding out a bowl of stew, hot and inviting despite a slightly earthy smell. Elsa gives her sister a look for disturbing the conversation, but Anna shrugs. “She is tired and hungry. She will not understand you until she has food and sleep. More talk when the sun rises.”

A few bites and Emma’s already lost in the stew, something she didn’t realize she’d missed until the second the hot broth touched her tongue. “Shit, what’s in this? It’s perfect.”

“Reindeer,” Anna deadpans. “And...well, I do not know your word for it. It is called _svamper_. It grows from the dead, in the wet and dark. Sometimes it kills.”

“Mushroom?” She picks at the bowl, pulls out what definitely looks like a mushroom. “Yep, that’s a mushroom. This one won’t kill me, right?”

“No,” Anna says, shrugging again. “But it will make you see many things.”

Emma lets the mushroom drop back into the stew. “...wait.”

 

 

 

 

Sometime before dawn, Emma’s eyes open. Elsa is standing over her, fur falling over her shoulder, smiling knowingly.

“You are coming.”

“Uh, I should hope the heck not.”

Emma is flat on her back on a bed of furs, her left side warm from the dying fire. The shieldmaiden’s head now appears beside her sister’s, less amused.

“Elsa has felt an arrival. You must go outside.”

Emma attempts to sit up, suddenly aware of the fact that she is slightly off balance. “Outside?”

“Yes,” Elsa says, and she and her sister help Emma to her feet, patting her gently in the direction of the door. “Quickly.”

Despite the fact her head does not feel quite...right, Emma is also aware of the fact that this would probably be an excellent opportunity for her guardians to murder her or send her into a trap, so she digs in her heels. “Uh, how about we just--”

But the vulva is surprisingly strong for a vulva, not that vulva’s aren’t strong muscles of their own if you do your kegels right. “No, Emma, you must go outside.”

And like that, she’s been shoved out the door, only to come face to face with--

Herself.

Other Emma is wearing a combination of leather and armor that looks similar to Anna’s, and she’s got one hand on the hilt of a sword. She’s also making a noise like relief, and smiling. “Oh, thank god it’s _you_. And by you, I mean me.”

Actual Emma remains pinned to the side of the hut, completely motionless, wondering just how many fucking mushrooms were in that stew.

Other Emma gives Actual Emma an apologetic smile. “I know this is a lot right now, but bear with me because we don’t have much time. I am you, but from the future. I am here to let you know that your daughter’s going to show up in about, oh, forty to forty five minutes, so it’d be awesome if you didn’t try to kill her or anything. Also, I know you’re having doubts because you don’t want to face the reality of being a parent again, but you’re definitely _Svanhvít_. Okay, got it? Daughter’s coming, you’re _Svanhvít_. Cool. Great. Oh, and this is really important. You need to stay put. Stick to Anna and Elsa. Do _not_ bail. You'll know when to move on, don't worry, but for now -- keep your ass right here _._ ”

“Wait--”

“Can’t wait, the future needs me.”

“But there’s fucking _time travel_ now?”

“Oh, I know. Shit is wild. Trust me, this is going to get a lot more complicated in, well, thirty eight minutes. Keep it real, me.”

And Other Emma disappears with a resounding pop.

 

 

 

 


	4. i. قرطبة

 

 

 

 

Three weeks ago they’d tumbled into each other, spilled and crashed and broken into pieces, rebuilt by the other’s hand. That was the first time. 

Two weeks ago she hadn’t been able to get enough of her. Regina was too used to disappointment, loss to ask for it, but the second Emma stepped through the door, it was all she could do not to drag her upstairs and beg to be devoured. There was a kind of ravenous hunger to what they did, as if they expected to be stopped at any minute. As if each time would be the last time.

In the last few days, it had become more tender, more intimate. Now if she cried out, bit into the pillow to mask the noise, Emma would use her spare hand to stroke her forehead and kiss her cheek. When they were done, Emma wouldn’t leave immediately, not like she used to - now they could sleep together, arms tangled, one leg tucked under the other. For a minute, and only that minute, Regina had sighed, and thought perhaps this time, just this time, it could work. It could be good. It could last.

Now the wind whips up the dune, kicking sand into their way. Regina has a protective spell around them, but it’s as exhausted as she is, fraying along the edges, letting spits and sputters of sand in when she stumbles. At first, despite his mother’s quiet explanations, Henry was sure he could get a signal on his phone. When the first bit of windburn started settling into his cheeks, along with the sunburn on his nose, she ignored the aches in her limbs and set about creating a barrier spell. It was weak, not nearly strong enough to last the rest of the journey, but it would do for now.

“Another sand snake,” Henry says, freezing when he sees the shape spiraling from the sand into the sky a few dunes off. “Jeez, they’re freaking huge.”

“They can’t hurt you, Henry. They don’t eat meat -- they survive on water they find under the dunes.” She’d read that in a book as a child, but she’d also heard it from the guide who had brought their caravan through this desert many, many years ago. “The only danger they pose is accidentally falling into one of their dens. You can’t see them from the surface, but it’ll be quite the tumble.”

Henry’s shielding his eyes to the sun, still staring at the serpent fading into the distance. “You’re sure they don’t eat us?”

She places one hand on his shoulder, taps his cheek. “I’m sure.”

Henry puffs up his chest, stumbling into a slightly more confident stance. “I mean, I’ll take one on if I have to, but I don’t know how well that’ll go for the sand snake.”

She smiles to herself, hoping he doesn’t see her amusement. “I know, dear.”

“Have you been here before? Back when you were queen, I mean.”

“Actually, I was a princess. My grandmother was the daughter of the caliph in Cordova before she married my grandfather. I was brought here on a royal visit, to meet their family.”

“How old were you?”

She counts backwards. “Eleven,” she says. “Almost your age.”

He grins. “Well, that’s good, right? That means you’re cousins with the royals here, and they can help us.”

The hopefulness in his voice, that optimistic smile - she pulls him into a hug, hopes he can’t feel that she’s shaking against him. “That’s the plan,” she says, and when did he get as tall as her? He’ll be taller than her yet, especially if he takes after his ma. “If we can get to the palace, we should be able to find a way back, and a way to your mother.”

“So we’re going the right way?”

She points to the sun overhead. “We’re going north. I remember my geography - the desert is at the southernmost point of the province. Just keep walking north and we’ll hit someone who knows how to get there.”

“Sounds good to -- _whoa_.” A sand snake has emerged from the dune just behind them, soaring an arms length overhead. Henry stands in front of his mother, arms spread adorably wide. “Mom,” he whispers. “There’s someone riding it.”

And there might be a figure on the sand snake’s back, turning to look at them as it flies past, but they do not have time to consider this, because with their next step, the sand is collapsing around them, and Regina has a few seconds to enforce her barrier spell as they tumble into the darkness below.

 

 

 

 

They are hovering a foot above the cavern floor, Regina’s entire body seizing with the effort of the spell. She gives up only when the pain becomes excruciating, letting them drop to the ground. Henry yelps, jumping to his feet and staring back up at the hole dozens of meters above them, the pure blue sky illuminating the orange glow of the underground cavern that is now their surroundings.

“Well,” Regina says, brushing herself off. “I suppose that talk about the sand snake dens was timely.”

“Is that where we are?” Henry’s craning his neck, still staring at the ceiling. “I hope it doesn’t come back.”

“It’s more afraid of us than we are of it.”

Henry shoots her a look over his shoulder. “I’m _not_ afraid of it.”

She smirks. “I know.” But now that her eyes are adjusting and she’s got her bearings, she can see that this is not just the den of a sand snake. There are patterns carved into the stone here, footholds and compartments, places where harnesses that seem to be made from dried gut and leather have been hung, drums of water sunk into the ground. She racks her brain for the other books she’s read about the Cordoban deserts, the ones that mention the tribes that ride serpents --

“Mom,” Henry says, his tone rising. He’s at the other side of the cavern, holding up something that looks like a dark cloak. “I think somebody lives here.”

“You’re close,” she murmurs, peering closer at the contents of the wall. “I think this is where they keep their sand snake.”

“Like a pet?”

“More like a horse.”

“Jeez.”

 

 

 

 

“That’s it,” Henry says, collapsing onto a bench that has been carved out of the cavern wall. “There’s no way out. No doors, no tunnels, no nothing.”

“I might be able to bring us to the surface with a levitating spell, but,” Regina exhales, running a hand through her sand-crusted hair. “I’ll have to rest.” She makes a fist, opening it and closing it, a weak white flame forming in her palm, sputtering out. 

“Maybe whoever was here will come back and give us a hand.”

 _You think the best of everyone, Henry._ And she loves him for that, but it worries her, too.

“Maybe,” she says. She puts a hand on his arm, rests her head on his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

He shrugs her off, his tone changing the way a thirteen year old’s tone typically changes. “Are you?”

She sighs.

“Henry,” she starts, but he shakes his head.

“Look, I already knew about you and Ma.” His cheeks are red, and he’s leaning low on his elbows, his face angled away. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I just...” He takes a deep breath, shoulders heaving. “I saw you guys last week. You were in the kitchen, and Ma was kissing you, and at first...I thought maybe you were hurting each other or something.” His toe stirs the sand. “I didn’t know if you were back to not liking each other again.”

“Oh.” She watches the very particular way he avoids her eye, the distinct furrowed line of his brow. “Henry, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you.”

“I’m not _upset_ , it’s not a bad thing. I just...I knew what it would mean.”

She pauses. “What does it mean?”

“That everyone will be mad about it. And obviously they are, because we’re here.” He gestures around them, the large chamber of the cavern, the desert above. 

“Well,” she says, reaching down for a handful of sand and letting it sift through her fingers. She would rather reach for his hand. “I suppose your mother and I should have seen that coming, too. But that was always going to be our problem to deal with, not yours, and certainly not _here_. If I had known this would all end with a portal--” 

“ _Mom_ ,” Henry says, and her son’s voice is quiet, too careful for a thirteen year old. “You didn’t even fight back. They said you were banished and you just let them go through with it...you just...” His voice trails off. She shivers.

How does she tell her son that every ounce of pleasure was a half ounce of guilt? How does she tell her son that the moment they turned on her, their faces souring, their friendships and loyalties gone cold, she’d felt that she deserved it? How does she tell him that from the moment her lips had touched Emma’s, a part of her had known that she would be punished for that warmth, punished for even the tiniest speck of happiness just as she’d always been, just as it would always be?

How does she tell him that she fears the only way to get Emma back is to go through with that punishment, and suffer every second of it?

“It wouldn’t have helped your mother if I’d fought back. If you’d stayed, it wouldn’t have helped you either.”

“You can’t let them treat you like that.”

“Like I betrayed them? Hurt them? In a way, I did.”

“But you’re not the reason Ma disappeared. _You_ didn’t bring on the curse, something else did.”

 _As far as we know._ Which is not far, Regina admits, and there is a large part of her that does believe whatever happened in that bed last night is the reason Emma disappeared, and the cold descended, and eventually, somehow, they ended up here.

“It’s complicated, Henry.”

“It’s not _that_ complicated.”

“It is,” she says, shorter and sterner this time. He catches this tone, gets to his feet.

“You should rest,” he says, suddenly a strange new adult, no longer thirteen and waiting for his mother to tell him what to do.

Eventually, slow and painful minutes later, she closes her eyes.

 

 

 

 

In her dream, she is in a study, not unlike the one she used to have as a queen. This one has no windows, though, but stacks upon stacks of books and baubles and magical equipment, shelves of tomes and ingredients. It is dimly lit, with only a single candle on the desk, but there are glowing spheres on the ceiling, foxfire dancing along the shelves. It’s warm, and smells of cinnamon and apples, and she is not alone.

“Hey stranger.”

It’s Emma, but it’s a different Emma. There’s a scar that runs from her left eye to the corner of her mouth, a shock of white in her hair. She isn’t _older_ per say, but magic has a way of running through people, leaving its mark, and its touch is everywhere on this Emma, clear as her scar.

This Emma is smirking, leaning against the doorway in leather armor. Part of her hair has been shaved, and the rest is pulled up behind her head, partially in braids. Not unlike the style worn by the Heimili shieldmaidens that used to raid along the coast when she was queen, and Regina wonders if there’s something to this appearance.

“You’re not my Emma,” she says, but she is calm, only curious. 

“What gave me away?” Dream Emma taps on her leather pauldrons, points at the scar on her face. “The superior badass armor or the gnarly scars?”

Regina shakes her head, smirking. “You _sound_ like my Emma. Are you a dream fragment?”

“I wish,” Dream Emma says, snorting. “That sounds preferable to the amount of space and time barriers I’ve had to force my way through today. You see this?” She points at one of her braids, ice white where it used to be blonde. “That happened a few hours ago. And see, you warned me that I’d probably start feeling the effects of magic, and I was all, okay Regina, sure Regina, because I thought I was too tough and strong for this shit. But nope, I’ve officially gone white. By the time I get back, I’m going to look like the fucking crypt keeper.”

And Regina’s a bit breathless now, because she isn’t unfamiliar with such matters, knows the unbelievable amount of force and energy and magic and _true love_ required for it, but it’s never been _Emma_ she expected to see on the other side of such a journey, and certainly not for her. “You’re from...the future?”

Future Emma looks thrown for a second, lets out a long exhale. “Ah, you said that you’d probably ask about that. And then you gave me a detailed explanation for what exactly it is I’m doing and how it’s possible, which I...kind of forgot. So the long and short of it is yes, I’m sort of from the future, in a manner of speaking.”

“So this is not a dream.”

“Not really. You built this place.” She sweeps her arm over her shoulder, gesturing at their surroundings. “It was your weekend project for a while. You explained it to me as a kind of, uh, tiny time and space airport?”

“A juncture? Really. That’s clever of me.” She wants to take a closer look at the crowded shelves, but she knows there must be a limit to the amount of time they can spend in a space like this. “We can’t have very long.”

“We don’t,” Future Emma says. “But I don’t really have a message. This is sort of a test run, if that makes sense. I’m just making sure this works, and that you can get here without too much of a problem. Since that seems to be the case, I should probably send you back.”

“Wait,” she says, reaching for the familiar figure, even if she knows it isn’t _her_ exact person. “You’re from the future, so you must know what happens now. Where is my Emma?”

“Uh, north. Very far north.” She taps on the front of her armor as a hint. “She’s in Heimili, but don’t get any ideas. You wouldn’t be able to reach her, er, me in time.”

Regina’s stomach drops. “In time? Is she safe?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Eating reindeer, fighting trolls, getting buff.” Future Emma flexes, a rather silly gesture she shares with Current Emma. “How do you think this happens?”

“I should take Henry and--”

“Nope, don’t even try it. She’s moving around. Honestly, you have bigger fish to fry down here in the desert. You’ll probably be hearing about that when you wake up.”

There’s a rumbling, and the room shakes and shimmers, fading for a few seconds.

Future Emma glances at the ceiling. “That’s our cue. We only have a minute left, so we should leave before it collapses.” She makes for the door, hand on its surface, but turns before she opens it. Her expression is different now, almost strange and unfamiliar to Regina’s experience of her own Emma, something warmer and more knowing in her eyes. It’s as if she’s remembered something she’s always wanted to ask.

Future Emma’s voice grows quieter, her tone more tender. “Do you know yet?” 

Regina narrows her eyes, unsure. “Do I know what?”

“You’ve never told me when it was you found out. How long have you been on the other side?”

“Only a day.” She blinks. “I don’t understand. What is it I don’t know yet?”

“Oh,” Future Emma says, and she cups Regina’s cheek. It’s Emma’s hand, the same warmth, but her palm is harder, her fingers rough. She kisses her forehead, and then steps back, smiling at Regina. Her gaze flickers downwards, only for a second. “I always regret that I missed this part. It didn’t seem right that you had to find out on your own. By the time I got there, there were definitely no questions left.”

“What are you--”

But the room is flickering like a light, the vision of it fading to grey in increasing increments, and Future Emma removes her palm, pulls back to the doorway.

“The candle,” she says, nodding to the light on the desk. “Blow it out and you’ll wake back up. I’ve got to take the door.”

“When will I see you again?”

“Specifically me?” Future Emma winks. “Oh, it’ll be a while. I look pretty damn good for my age, actually.”

And the door closes behind her. Regina is left alone in the study, slightly shaking, and all she can do now is blow out the flame.

 

 

 

 


	5. i. hel

 

 

 

 

_Well, shit._

This is how Emma finds herself collapsing into the snow, ignoring that it is soaking her weird leather Viking pants, sitting there for a good minute before she turns to the unimpressed redhead behind her, gesturing blankly. Because really. _Really_?

“You just saw that, right? You just saw a more badass version of me appear and disappear like Back to the freaking Future?”

Anna shrugs, tattooed arms crossed. “I am not your eyes, _Svanhvít_.”

“Wait a second. The _mushrooms_. Am I tripping?” She gets to her feet, making a swipe for the front of Anna’s tunic. “Am I tripping balls?”

“No,” the shieldmaiden says, removing Emma’s hands without much difficulty, considering her still-surprising strength. “It would take the testes of a troll to trip your step, I think. Their testes can be very large.”

Now Elsa is at her side, brow furrowed as she presses a wooden cup into her hand. “Drink, Emma.”

“Oh no, I’m not falling for this again. What is this, LSD tea? Peyote juice? First you feed me shrooms, and now you send me on my vision quest. Look, I am not here for Viking Burning Man.”

“It’s only water.”

“And I was only supposed to have a visitor, but instead I came face to face with future me who word vomited a lot of plot development and then ran off into another time.” She shoots the vulva – and yes, she is definitely a vulva right now - a look. “I thought we were supposed to be able to trust each other. Or maybe my idea of what to expect from your standard soothsaying quest giver was too forgiving.”

Somehow, perhaps because she is too stunned to protest or perhaps because she is actually freezing, they usher her into the house. Elsa just about pushes her into a seat. “Sit down and take a deep breath, Emma. I’m sure this is a shock.”

And as soon as she collapses into the chair – or an assembly of wood and antlers that wouldn’t pass for a chair on its best day – something inside her snaps. It’s tiny, a single thread of confidence, but it’s enough to make her drop her head into her hands.

“It’s real,” she breathes.

Elsa’s voice is soft. “Very real.”

“I have…a daughter. Or, _will_ have a daughter, I guess.”

“She lives now,” Elsa says, refilling Emma’s cup with the opening of her fist. “A flicker within your queen, a stirring, but she is there. And she is also walking between worlds, opening time like a knife.”

Emma gives her another look. “You didn’t tell me there would be time travel. You’d think that’d be the kind of shit you mention upfront.”

Elsa smirks. “You didn’t ask.”

Emma makes a face at that. “Well, consider this me asking you to mention anything out of the ordinary in this quest thing. Time travel, multiple universes, the rising of the undead, etcetera. No more curve balls, no more surprises.”

“Of course,” Elsa says. “No more surprises.”

 

 

 

 

But like most things in Emma Swan’s life, rules are ignored, sidestepped, or kicked when they’re down at an increasingly routine pace.

Because only minutes after Elsa has promised to keep Emma informed and Anna has rolled her eyes and gone back to her breakfast of reindeer jerky, there is a distinct rumbling. Emma watches a few slices of antler tremble their way off a table, and dried hooves tumble from the wall. The water in her cup soaks her wrists and the floor as the entire hut shakes around them.

“Is it just me, or is this feeling very Jurassic Park?”

Anna’s already out the door, and there’s a frost forming up Elsa’s arm. Emma doesn’t know what else to do but follow their lead and go storming out into the snow, nearly missing a falling animal skull in the process.

Emerging from the forest are about a dozen trolls, or what Emma assumes are trolls, considering the hairiness and the tails and the fact they are each about twenty feet tall and wearing little more than animal skins. Because really, at this point, why not trolls? Why not any number of monstrous beings from an alternate version of folklore and fairy tales showing up and tossing Emma into the next dangerous situation? Here she was, thinking that she’d finally found some semblance of normality – a warm bed with a warm occupant, arms around her when she slept, someone who made her feel like the entire world could rest easy in the palm of a former queen – but instead she’s standing in a foot of snow in an alternate reality, possibly tripping on mushrooms, definitely on the verge of getting her ass kicked.

The trolls stop a few feet in front of them and Emma braces herself for a kind of combat she is pretty sure she has no way of surviving, but Elsa does the unthinkable. She has approached the tallest troll and is speaking rapidly in a very guttural tongue, one hand resting on the troll’s knee. The troll, who might be a female or might not, not that Emma is here to impose the concept of gender on all trolldom, seems to be worried.

“These your friends?” she whispers to Anna, who nods curtly.

“Old friends.”

So, maybe she won’t die after all?

Elsa turns to Emma and her sister, her brow now as equally furrowed as the troll’s ten-times-the-size brow. There has been a whole lot of brow furrowing today, that's for darn sure, and Emma can only imagine how much more furrowing of brows there will be before this day is out. “There is a rift opening on the edge of the forest. Draugr are pouring out - they overtook Trollandsby and they are headed here.”

Anna looks at her sister, and then Emma. She pulls one of her swords off her back and tosses it to Emma, who makes a face and narrowly misses catching it by the blade. Still, counting that as one point for Emma’s gracefulness. “Then we are ready.”

Emma blinks. “Ready for what? What’s a rift and what’s a draugr?”

Already, Elsa is driving her wand into the ground, rolling it between her hands. “There is not enough time to explain in detail. You know there are two worlds, yours and ours, but within our own there are places we go beyond this one, beyond the grave. Places like Valhalla and Hel. Just as you have walked through a rift from your world to this one, others have walked from their worlds to ours.”

“These others being the draugr, whatever they are?”

“The dead,” Anna says, making a face. “Terrible smell. Very strong. Hard to kill.”

“For fuck’s sake, did I not specifically mention the undead in my whole ‘give me a heads up’ request?”

A wall of ice is slowly rising around them, inch by inch, which seems to be Elsa’s doing. She breaks her concentration only long enough to give Emma a look of sympathy. “They should not be here. I did not see them coming, not in any vision. For draugr to rise, it is not…natural.”

Emma sighs. “No offense, but your definition of ‘natural’ is a little iffy in this neck of the woods.”

“It takes a great deal of tainted seiðr to break a binding and raise the dead. To raise this many at once…” but she trails off, and the ice grows around them, and Emma is more preoccupied with what a future version of her had earlier imparted.

“My daughter is supposed to be here. How is that going to work with us fighting off these draugr things?”

But Elsa does not have her usual knowing smile and answer for Emma. Instead, she only glances at her, a look whose meaning is difficult to untangle, and goes back to the formation of the ice wall.

The trolls are now staring at Emma, which is unnerving enough to slightly distract her from an oncoming army of Viking super-zombies for now. The nearest troll squats, which means it is now only five feet taller than Emma, and gestures at her.

“ _Valkyrja?_ ” it asks, its voice the equivalent of ten simultaneous rockslides. Anna answers for her.

“ _Svanhvít_ ,” she says, nodding at Emma, which appears to have an impact on the trolls, as they all gasp in recognition, gaping at her in what Emma imagines is shock and awe.

“Uh, Anna? They seem to know who I am.”

“You will find few in our lands who do not know of _Svanhvít_ ,” she says, and this gets at least a small grin from the shieldmaiden. “You are legend.”

“A legend for what exactly?”

Anna has brought out her armor from the hut, and is pulling it on with surprising swiftness. “If we survive this battle, _Svanhvít_ , we will drink mead before the fire tonight and I will tell you all your stories. If we do not survive, then we will drink mead in Valhalla and we will hear the all-father himself tell your stories in his hall.”

Emma weighs the sword in her hand, lighting a flame with her other. “I appreciate that we’re drinking in either outcome.”

 

 

 

 

So, draugr. Emma would like to say a few things about draugr.

Firstly, they smell like actual death. Which makes sense, since they are technically dead, but no amount of rotting fish, decomposing corpses, fresh human shit on a park bench, or the waters of Boston could ever prepare her for the stench of draugr. It’s enough to make you vomit on the spot, which Emma nearly does when the first members of the horde make their way out of the trees.

Arrows are flying, inhuman groans and moans are sounding like the worst chorus of all time, and about those arrows? Deceptively good shots, the draugr. That’s thing number two: draugr are insanely lethal for your standard zombie, enough to ruin your day from the sheer shock of their effectiveness. Especially considering that Emma has thought of herself up until now as one of those heroic protagonists who is essentially bulletproof, but the arrow that narrowly slices her cheek, just enough to draw blood and leave what she imagines is the first scar in what will be a series of many, is a frightening revelation.

The third thing to know about draugr is that they do fry up pretty good when you light their ass with _bruni_ , which Emma is now doing as fast and hard as she can, screaming for maximum effectiveness. She has no problem going full Rambo on these bitches, a reference that is lost on Anna even when she shouts it over the noise twice.

The trolls are doing their part, and it only takes a decent swing of their arm to send a draugr flying the length of a football field, but the draugr are scary resilient and bounce right back, dehydrated skin and unattached skeletal limbs flapping in the wind as they race back to the battlefield. Like cockroaches, these undead assholes.

Anna has made good work of the draugr on her corner, that sword and shield just as much a force of nature as Emma had imagined they’d be in her hands. Elsa’s got entire shards of ice pinning draugr to each other and bursting through heads and chest cavities, and if Emma had time to take any of this in when she isn’t dodging and slicing, she’d find it pretty insane that these seemingly small and mild-mannered girls are both essentially walking weapons. But she doesn’t have time for anything else in the din of this battle: there are at least thirty draugr for each of them, and even with twenty-foot trolls and two magic-wielders, the exhaustion is starting to set in. Just when Emma has found herself tripping too often, blades nicking her knuckles and a few good skeletal elbows and fists finding her face and ribs, something very awful appears on the horizon.

The great and abominable grandpappy of all draugr.

Or at least, it seems to be a draugr until it gets closer, and Emma might as well hear the opening notes of O Fortuna playing when this fella stares her down, green eyes burning, flaming hair – no, literally, his hair is on fire – fanning around him as if he is suspended in midair. But he’s not suspended so much as casually or not so casually floating through the skirmish, his skin glowing, twin battleaxes also glowing, and he’s wearing armor that appears to be made from human remains. Fabulous, Emma thinks. Just fucking fabulous.

Elsa stops, only for a minute, just long enough for Emma to notice, when she sees the figure. Now she is frantically slinging up ice, her wand swinging in elaborate shapes, only for each instance of magic to burst into flames and ash. She starts chanting, the ground rising around them, displacing draugr and knocking a few trolls onto their backs, but none of this seems to have bothered whoever this clearly evil fella is.

Emma, never one to run from a boss battle, decides to charge directly at him with her one sword and one flaming hand. A single flick of his fingers sends her flying through the snow and directly into the wall of the hut. She groans at the shock of pain and tries to get to her feet. Her left arm, the one that was formerly slinging _bruni_ is definitely broken.

Through the haze of battle, she sees Elsa entangled with the aggressor, ice meeting fire over and over again, wrist to wrist, hand to hand. Anna is trying to keep the draugr off her sister’s back, but it’s clear that she’s losing that fight, and Elsa is being overtaken, barely able to shield herself with magic.

And this is when it happens.

There is blinding red magic, unmistakable in its brilliance, and a figure who is very much not a troll slices through the enemy’s arm, a dark stream of magic sending him to the ground. He hisses, attempts to stand up, but the red and black magic is flaring around the warrior, who is moving impossibly quick. There is a sound like a thunderclap and boss draugr has disappeared, likely to his own safety, the coward, but the woman who took him down is still in the snow, making quick work of the remaining draugr.

Emma’s running from the hut, trying to see the woman’s face, but she can only make out dark hair and something familiar in her features. For a second she thinks it’s Regina, wants to yell her name and race across the skirmish to take her in her arms and press her forehead to her own and refuse to let go, evil undead Vikings be damned. But the woman turns and she’s more girl than woman, small but lanky under her armor, just out of her teenage years. The girl sees Emma, locks her gaze long enough for Emma to see that one of her eyes is black and the other red, and blinks in recognition.

“Ma?”

Emma nearly drops to her knees. “Oh.”

The girl’s magic flashes, popping like fireworks and then shimmering away as she breaks into a grin. “Ma!”

But there’s a whiz and thud, the distinct sound of an arrow burying itself in flesh. An arrow is now sticking out of the girl’s side. She stumbles, catching herself before she falls over, her hand glowing red as it reaches for the shaft of the arrow. And like that, bleeding and pinned by an arrow, Emma’s daughter gives her mother an apologetic look and disappears into nothingness. _Fuck._

Emma doesn’t realize she’s screaming until Anna has her by the elbow, yanking her out of the way of a battleaxe swinging towards her head.

“Emma, you must fight!”

But there is nothing but the red ring in the snow where her daughter has just disappeared, and Emma’s desperate need to collapse in the wake of what just happened. She spins, nearly dropping her sword. “Where did she go?”

“You cannot follow. You must fight now.” Anna pulls her out of the way of yet another blade, swinging her own to take out a draugr.

“But she was just--”

“ _Fight._ ”

And somehow, her left arm useless, her body throbbing with pain and confusion and the revelation of the last few minutes, Emma ignites her sword in bright flames and helps finish this thing. Whether it is from the suffering of a broken bone or pure exhaustion, when the final draugr falls to the ground, she finds herself falling too, and the world going blissfully dark around her.

 

 

 

 

When she opens her eyes again, she finds herself looking up at a similar sight from this morning – Anna and Elsa hovering over her, Elsa’s hands covered in mud and melting snow, moving over her arm, Anna’s face artfully bruised. Emma looks down at her arm, bound in antlers and what appears to be a combination of a few different earthly substances she can’t identify right now, and the rest of her body, completely naked. She starts at that, but then she notices that Anna is topless, which reveals that her entire torso is also tattooed in blue runes and swirling designs.

“Uh, where are my clothes?”

Elsa nods towards the fire in the center of the room. “Drying.”

“I see.” Emma attempts to sit up, only to be gently forced back down by Elsa. “Any chance I could get a strategically draped sheepskin or something?”

Elsa cocks her head. “You are cold? You shouldn’t be. I have been sealing you with heat and healing magic for the past hour.”

“I’m just feeling a little, uh… _exposed_.”

“Oh,” Elsa says, smirking. “It is only a body, Emma. We are not so shameful about our skin as your kind.”

“I’m not ashamed. Just not really used to having my ladyparts on display with strangers.”

“Are we strangers?” Elsa asks, looking slightly hurt by the word.

“We have shed blood together,” Anna says, rubbing a type of salve into a shallow cut along her ribs. “We have given our life’s water for each other. We are not strangers anymore.”

“Still wouldn’t mind that sheepskin.”

Elsa waves a hand above Emma’s form, disturbing the shimmering layer there. “The healing will not work through a barrier.”

“Fine. Naked it is.” Emma sighs. “All kinds of firsts on this quest, ladies. All kinds.”

“Do not worry, Emma,” Anna says, strolling past with a fur now draped over herself, clearly a slight taunt. “Soon I will tell you the stories of your great deeds and you will think nothing of your naked and weak body.”

Emma hops up onto her elbows, only to be once again forced back down with gentle persistence by Elsa. “Who are you calling weak. Carrots? I just killed a bunch of fucking undead Vikings with one hand.”

Anna shrugs. “There is no need for anger. You will grow stronger. For now, you are like baby reindeer.”

Elsa says something in their own language to Anna, clearly chastising her, but Anna shrugs, looking unbothered. Elsa turns back to Emma, her expression changing.

“Emma, there is something we did not tell you.”

Oh.

 

 

 

 


	6. i.محاكم التفتيش

 

 

 

 

 

Regina wakes up before Henry. His back is curled against hers, his hands tucked under his chin like he’s still a little boy. Something in her chest aches, the pull of memory and older kinds of love, the feeling of this simple moment being right.

It was always like this, in a way. There were the first sleepless nights with her face pressed to the bars of his crib, lungs full, terrified that even her breath would wake him. Five-year-old Henry had been plagued with nightmares, and on those times he’d escape his own bed to climb under her covers, she was never able to go back to sleep. She’d lie there and watch him, let him clutch her wrist with his small hands, wonder what demons she’d have to do battle with to make his dreams sweet and easy again. And she’d fight more than demons for him, she’d known that even then. Regina would take on the world for Henry, and she’d do it again and again if she had to, and she’d never question it for a moment. He was hers. She was his. The ferocity of motherhood, the intensity she’d never expected when he’d first found his way into her life - that would never die.

Now he is thirteen, almost a teenager, nearly a man, still very much a boy, sleeping on the floor of a sand snake’s den too many feet below the surface of a gold and shifting desert. Not exactly where she’d imagined them waking up today.

But she’d always wanted to take him to Cordova, hadn’t she? To walk with him down tiled streets out of her oldest memories, show him how the architecture shifted to the whim of its creators, to watch him press his hand up against the walls and let him feel the warm hum of magic underneath. If they could just get there, if she could see them both across this desert, maybe it would all have been worth it. And then they could get to Heimili, to _Emma_ , and the thought of seeing her again, of being close enough to touch her, is enough to catch her breath in her throat.

She lifts her fingers, imagines them lacing with Emma’s, the heat that would follow. Dust filters through them now, a kind of answer. She makes fists, rests them on her knees.

But first, Cordova.

If she closes her eyes again, if she leans her head back against the cool of the wall, she can smell it and taste it - the Cordova of her childhood. Magic throbbing in every inch of the city -fountains gleaming with healing waters, endless arches and columns in infinite precision that were constructed from thin air by sorcerers wrapped in gold and crimson, musicians floating through painted ceilings, heat and honey on the tongue, almonds and dates and salted fish. She remembers her grandmother’s mother, a tiny ancient woman who could weave magic through her hands as easy as water through a sieve. Regina had sat with her every night, watching her work shapes into existence, staring enraptured as the room changed and the light shifted with a few flicks of her fingers. And there had been other things, still tangible; the hot stone under her feet, the blue light of the royal gardens, the angry tears when her mother had dragged her back into the palanquin on her departure, promising she would never see this place again. Yet another case of her mother being wrong, it seems.

When she opens her palms, they ignite with bright red magic, flickering with white and black sparks.

Well, that’s certainly different.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry stirs next to her, his eyes half-open when he lifts his head. He blinks at the contents of her palms, shaking the sleep from his limbs as he gets onto his elbows.

“That’s not your normal color, is it?”

She spreads her fingers, testing the shape of the magic within. Its intensity is too hot, almost heavy in her hands, and when she tries to put it out, it spits and sputters in protest, the sparks leaping up her wrists. She pulls harder, but she is shocked to find that the magic fights her, only giving up when she pushes down the heat in her chest, reciting a few of the old words to cool it. That is not…ideal.

“No,” she breathes, hoping he did not see the momentary panic there. “It’s not.”

“Why is it different?”

“I’m not sure. It might just be a side effect from the portal, or it might be the form it’s taking in this world. But it’s nothing to worry about,” she adds, giving him a quick smile. “Magic isn’t as predictable as we’d like to think. Sometimes the abnormal is normal.”

“Oh,” he says, his brow furrowing for only a moment before his teenage instincts take over. “Cool.” He brushes off his knees, shaking the dust and sand from his hair. There’s a thin layer of it on both of them now, and she imagines that’ll be a constant for the remainder of this journey. “So does that mean you’ve got enough magic to get us to the surface?”

She nods. “And then we walk to Cordova. Or,” she adds, when she sees his expression. “A little magic might help us get there faster.”

He grins. “Maybe we could get a ride on one of those sand snake things.”

“Well, you never know what might--”

As if on cue, the ceiling of the cave darkens with the thunderous arrival of a massive shape, and a sand snake is spiraling down to the floor of the den. Regina grabs Henry, propelling them back against the wall with a quick burst of magic, but the red and black glow singes the ground, and even as she’s pinning him behind her, she cannot put it out, the sparks still springing up her wrists.

The snake is massive, the length of a house, its head a wider version of a python, toothless and dim-eyed and somewhat dopey in character. Once it’s rested on the floor, it coils in on itself, seemingly unbothered by the new occupants of its den. On its back, a figure dressed entirely in tight black robes, its face covered, sits astride a saddle. The figure is small, but there’s a commanding quality to their presence, shoulders squared and head cocked. A high but stern voice rattles off something in a language Regina had never been allowed to learn in full. When the figure receives no answer, the command comes again.

“We mean you no harm,” Regina says, keeping Henry behind her despite his attempts to do otherwise. “My son and I fell into your den by mistake. We need to get to Cordova.”

The slight figure dismounts the snake, taking a few steps towards them before removing their mask. Regina is only half-surprised to see a young woman staring back at her, eyes lined in thick kohl, her mouth tight in a frown. When she speaks, it is with an accent all too familiar to Regina’s ears, a sound she has not heard in many, many years.

“Cordova?” the young woman repeats, her mouth rounding out the vowels and giving the sounds a new intensity. The word sounds like an accusation coming from her lips.

“Yes, my son and I need to--”

The young woman shakes her head, her eyes on the flickers of magic at Regina’s fingertips. “There is nothing for you there.”

“Well,” Regina says, attempting to keep an even tone. “We will be the judges of that.”

The young woman raises her chin, curiosity sparking in her eyes. “Who are you?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

A silver dagger flashes beneath the shifting of the black robe, a hand at her waist. The girl gives Regina a one-over, frowning. “You drop into my den wearing clothing of no origin, speaking with foreign accents.” She nods at Regina’s hands. “You wield _sihr_ and you expect me to accept that flimsy explanation?” She cocks her head, smirking. “I was not born this morning, trespasser.”

Regina is desperate to keep still, knowing Henry will feel the slightest tremble in his grip on her arm. “As I said, we mean you no harm.”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.” The girl’s hand is on the hilt of that dagger, and for all the command in her tone, Regina is almost entirely sure she’s bluffing. She’s also sure – though she isn’t sure _why_ she’s sure – that she can trust her. Besides the lack of evidence. Besides the logical path of resolution. Besides all of this, something deep inside of her, something like magic, has twisted into a place of understanding. She’ll take the time to parse that out later.

She takes a deep breath, adjusts her shoulders to the stance of a queen trained for the claim she is about to make. “My name is Regina. My grandmother was Bahja, daughter of Ghalib al-Zoran, married to Xavier the First. I am...I _was_ queen of the Enchanted Forest. I seek the aid of Cordova based on the blood I share with the caliphate.”

This seems to inspire a flicker of something bright and wild across the young woman’s face and she nods, appearing to hold back a smirk.

“I know who you are,” she says, now pulling back her hood to reveal a mass of jet black hair, tied into a long braid. She goes to the work of adding a series of harnesses to her sand snake, tying new restraints. “My father told me about you.”

This was not what Regina was expecting. She is caught off-guard, swaying against Henry for a minute. “Your father?”

The girl nods again. “We knew many stories of the forests far in the north, and the kingdom that vanished into thin air. And of course, we knew of Bahja. She was my father’s favorite aunt.”

“Your father was Bahja’s nephew?”

“The final caliph of Cordova, yes.”

Henry is now the one to make a face, stepping out from his mother and gesturing between them. “Wait, what? You’re _cousins_?”

The girl looks at him, the hint of a smile on her lips. “Of a sort.”

But Regina’s mind is racing, the reality of it all only beginning to sink in. “Are you…”

“You wouldn’t know me, not if your kingdom vanished to the other world when the stories said. My name is Yasmin. I was born many years after your visit, but I remember my father’s account, even if he was only a child. He said your mother was…well, I believe he meant to say unkind, although he used a stronger word than that. And he said that you set fire to our gardens.”

She can’t help but smile at the memory. “On accident.”

Which is true – Cora had been her usual mixture of cold and unmanageable on the visit, and after scolding her for the umpteenth time, an adolescent Regina had nearly burnt down the royal gardens in the uncontrolled burst of magic that followed. It had taken nothing on her mother’s part to put the flames out, only shriek after shriek of chastising, but Regina had thought it was worth it when she saw her great-grandmother’s smirk, the tiny woman’s paper-thin hands spelling a fiery bird into being. The bird flew silently from her palm into Regina’s. She remembers the heat of the spell when she closed her fist around it, and the scent of it that lingered for days – smoke and dates, cumin and salt.

The girl smirks. “The _sihr_ is strong in Bahja’s line. I was always jealous.” She flicks her black-gloved fingers, a few turquoise sparks fizzling there. “We were not so gifted on my father’s side. But he always said we made up for it in diplomacy.”

“I don’t understand. If you’re the daughter of the caliph, why are you here?”

At this, Yasmin’s face goes blank again. “Ah,” she says, and then pauses, only meeting Regina’s eye after a moment. “Because we have nowhere else to go. I’m an exile, like my father, but we are the lucky ones. Most never made it out.”

Regina’s mouth is suddenly dry. “Made it out?”

“I’m sorry,” Yasmin says, though every word is filled with fire. “The Cordova you once knew is no more. We were invaded from the north and our caliphate was driven out, our people forced to abandon their ways or face death. They have outlawed _sihr_ , tortured and burned our _musha'awith_. They rounded practitioners up like dogs, tore children from their mothers, jailed them until the jails filled, and then hanged the rest to clear them. There is no magic left in Cordova. It is a place of suffering now, of inquisition, nothing more. I called it my home my entire life, but I’d gladly lock the doors and burn it to the ground tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Henry says. “They killed all the people who practice magic?”

Yasmin’s frown softens, a look of sympathy settling there. “Worse.”

Regina sees Henry’s expression change, her son still unable to hide his emotions. She sees his confusion and panic, and immediately takes his hand, squeezes it. She wishes she did not echo his feelings in every chamber of her soul. She turns back to Yasmin, trying to regain her composure.

“But Cordova was the center of so much power. The magic itself should have prevented invasion.”

“That is another matter.” Yasmin looks at her hands. “One I will need more time to explain.”

Regina feels heat and freezing at her fingertips, vacillating wildly. When she looks down, her hands are sparking black and red again. She swallows down the fist in her throat. “I need to know more.”

Yasmin sighs. “I will take you to my father.” She lifts her chin to the ceiling. “You can’t go back up that way now– there will be a sandstorm before nightfall. He will want to meet you, and you will need to talk. There is…too much to discuss here.”

She removes her gloves, and lifts both hands above her head, turquoise glowing at her fingertips. With obvious difficulty, a barrier forms above them, and immediately fills with sand, pitching them in darkness for a moment until a few torches flicker in the walls around them, faint blue lights.

“Like I said,” the girl says, wiggling her fingers. “The _sihr_ isn’t as strong in my family. Not that it’s as strong for anyone now.”

And before Regina can ask what she means, the girl is making a fist and a passage has formed in the wall. Yasmin gestures to them to follow, and Henry looks at his mother.

“So,” he says, forcing a smile. “Your cousin’s pretty cool.”

 

 

 

 

 

Hours later, and Regina is standing on a roughhewn balcony carved into a rocky outcropping, staring out as the last light of day trickles across the dusty pink dunes. In the distance, the faint gleam of white lights dance over the square walls of Cordova, so far now that she could cover the entire city if she held her thumb up to the horizon. She shivers.

When they had first followed Yasmin through the opening, she had focused on the back of Henry’s head in front of her, the width of his shoulders, square like his mother’s, his nervous, excitable energy as he looked all around them. She knew what Yasmin had said had scared him. She knew from the way he kept reaching for her hand in a protective way, imitating an adult, how the questions he asked Yasmin were distractions, small things about the blue lights that flickered from holes in the wall, the carvings and white painted lines along the ceiling. Regina anchored herself to her love for him to avoid the overwhelming knowledge that was setting in with each step.

The passage had widened to a tunnel, joined by other smaller passages, and then it had steeply inclined until they were climbing up with handholds and a rudimentary ladder. When they finally reemerged, they found they were in an orange spire of an outcropping, rock the color of sunset smoothed by sand and wind over hundreds of years. A room had been carved into the rock here, low-ceilinged, with another narrow tunnel leading out to the open air, and another leading up to more rooms carved into the rock, up and up where dozens of families had made their homes. Sulitan had been waiting for them there, an imposing figure as wide as two men, a frown on his face when he saw the two strangers with his daughter.

“Yasmin?” his baritone voice had rumbled, and he’d gotten to his feet, eyes on Regina.

His daughter had spoken to Regina first, gesturing towards the tunnel leading outside. “Please,” she’d said, nodding. “I need a moment with my father.” When she saw her hesitation, she nodded again. “To explain everything. It might be better for you to wait outside. If someone here sees you, they…might not know what to make of you. We are not as friendly as we used to be. These are not trusting times.”

And this is how Regina finds herself on the balcony, her hand in Henry’s, waiting.

“So,” he says, letting go. He takes a closer step to the edge of the balcony, its edge a yard-high lip of smoothed rock. When he looks over his shoulder at her, he looks just like Emma, and her chest tightens. “Do you think we can trust them?”

“Yes,” she says, and she continues to be surprised by the strange tug inside of her, the warmth of assurance she’s never felt before. More highly abnormal magical behavior, not typical at all.

“Me too.” He doesn’t look at her now, his voice quieter. “What she said, about people with magic being rounded up and...and killed.”

“We don’t need to worry about that.”

“Uh, Mom?” He snorts. “I’m pretty sure we do. You practice magic, remember?”

“I’m not in danger.” She sets a hand on his shoulder. “We won’t be anywhere near Cordova. We can avoid the city entirely. If we go west to the coast, we can find a ship to Heimili-”

“But aren’t we going to help them?”

“Help who?”

“Yasmin, and everyone else. Isn’t that why the portal sent us here?”

She knows where he’s going with this, can see the golden arc of his noble intentions as clearly laid out and obtuse as the same argument his bull-headed mother would make. She attempts to circumvent it regardless. “The portal sent us here because it was hastily assembled by a group of underqualified hands who aren’t used to the task.”

“How many times have you told me magic has a mind of its own? Wouldn’t it make sense that magic sent us here to help them? They’re your family-”

“Very distant family, Henry. _You_ are the family I’m concerned about protecting.”

“I’m not the one who can’t control my magic.”

And she looks down at her hands, sparking red and black, the magic leaking from her fingertips in slow drips. She makes fists, rubs them on her sides, but it makes no difference.

“I knew it,” he says, eyes narrowing as his voice grows triumphant. “The magic isn’t listening to you, is it?”

“ _This_ ,” she says, holding out a hand that is still faintly glowing in colors that have never, ever been her own. “Is not evidence that we should attempt to conquer an entire city.”

“But the magic brought us here. Not the Enchanted Forest. Not wherever Ma is. It brought us here, and you’ve been here before, and there’s something terrible going on here that needs magic.”

“ _Henry._ ”

“Mom. Look at your hands. Look at that red stuff you threw up. I’ve seen you make spells a million times, and that’s never happened before. It means something.”

“It doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

His voice raises, his eyes wide and bright and as stubborn as Emma’s, always the picture of her when Regina needs it least. “It means the magic brought us here for a reason.”

“It means that something is wrong with me, Henry.” She doesn’t realize until it’s too late what she’s said, that the exasperation finally pushed it out of her, and now she can’t take it back. She shakes her head, closes her eyes. When she opens them, Henry is standing in front of her, his gaze searching her face.

“Mom?”

“I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I cannot siege a city and protect you at the same time. I’m sorry.” She pulls him into an embrace, knows he can feel the exhaustion in her and holds him there anyway. “You are not a risk I am ever willing to take.”

There’s a noise behind them, a quietly cleared throat. Regina turns to see Yasmin standing there. She nods once.

“My father will see you now.”

 

 

 

 

  

 

Sulitan had embraced them when they came to sit by his fire, saying that family was always welcome, but the tightness of his smile had not been lost on her, the hesitation when she’d moved the conversation from reminiscence to the current state of the world.

“It happened over a fortnight. First they trickled into our streets, made our people fearful, restless with a few words. It was not hard; it has not been easy these last ten years or so. Cordova has always held peace at its heart even with war at our doorstep, but the bloodshed outside our walls has grown worse with every passing season. In a week, an army was crawling over our gates. She tore us from the palace, chained us to each other, made a show of our humiliation in every public corner of the city.”

Henry is leaning forward, the skin of water Yasmin had given him earlier forgotten in his fist. “How did you escape?”

A slow, gentle smile forms on Sulitan’s wide face. “The love of our people. The legacy of my family.”

“We were smuggled under the city,” Yasmin says, mapping a tunnel in the air with her finger. “Out beneath the walls and into the desert.” Her voice grows quieter. “They were beggars, the ones who helped us. They were captured shortly after. They are dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Regina says. “It speaks to the type of caliph you were.”

Sulitan shakes his head, turning his palms to the sky. “A ruler who cannot save his people is no ruler at all. Merely a man with blood on his hands.”

“It’ll be her blood on _my_ hands soon enough,” Yasmin mutters, eyes burning. She runs a leather strap between her hands, one from the harness of the sand snake. Regina can imagine what it is capable of in the girl’s hands. “I fear no queen.”

Regina looks between the two of them. “And who exactly is this queen?”

“She is called Sofia the First. She came from the north, from Galdiz. Hers is a new order, but it is not the only one in our world. As the _sihr_... as the magic drains, these regimes take kingdom after kingdom, and we are unable to fight back. You’ve been on the other side for a long time.” Sulitan sighs, his eyes growing dim. “Things have changed.”

“I…I had no idea.”

Yasmin shrugs, tightening the knots in her fist. “You’ll find many things are different now.”

Sulitan nods. “We remember when the talk of magic leaving our world was only a rumor, something whispered to keep us afraid of our neighbor. Now it seems to be true.”

Regina shakes her head, still unable to believe what she’s hearing. “But no one can force magic from a world. It’d be like trying to rid the world of oxygen, or weather. It’s impossible.”

“So we thought. But it seems to leave of its own accord these days. Those that are left alive, those of us who joined the tribes in the desert or retreated to other kingdoms, the _sihr_ is weakening. What little news we hear from across the sand, from the north and the east, it is the same. Jafar says that wherever they made the first blow against magic, they struck an artery. It has been bleeding out ever since.”

There is a silence in the room as their gazes all fall on Regina. She doesn’t realize until it’s too late what they’re looking at – the sudden bleeding of red and black magic from her fingertips, pooling in her overturned palms. She closes her hands, attempts another silent cooling spell, but the magic fights even harder this time, ignores her entirely. It sparks brilliantly, forces her hand open, and burns to a blinding white before fading.

“Your _sihr_ ,” Sulitan rumbles, caution in his tone.

The leather is tight in Yasmin’s hands. “Was that some kind of demonstration?”

Henry shakes his head, moves closer to his mother. “She can’t control it,” he says, and Regina nearly sighs at the admission. “The magic in my mom is super strong. It sent us here to help you. That’s why we came here from our world, because we’re going to save Cordova.”

And Regina has to stop herself from saying something, because Yasmin’s eyes are wide and gleaming and Sulitan is looking at his daughter with a meaning that is certainly unexpected.

“I knew it,” Yasmin says, and grins at her father. “I told you, I _told_ you what Jafar saw in the stars. They are the ones that were written there.”

“We were in a prophecy?” Henry starts, looking all too excited. “Super cool.”

No, Regina thinks, all too familiar with the types of things that fated words may or may not set into motion. Not at all super cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	7. interlude: time

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tíðin rennur sum streymur í á.  
_Time runs like the river current._

 

 

 

 

 

The girl may be on borrowed time. Of course, time is something she’s never minded borrowing. Bartering, too, though less successfully.

She doesn’t know this forest, but something pulsing through her – in her wrists, her throat, leaking from the wound in her side – knows it.

“Weird,” she whispers. Talking makes her chest hurt. She knows the arrow didn’t pierce her lung – she’s alive, isn’t she - but the internal bleeding could still get her, she knows that much. Usually she’d reach out and pull from the environment around her to start healing, but…nothing? The realization runs through her body with all the fanfare of a fever.

There’s no sense of magic here. The snow that soaks her calves is only just dull and wet, but nothing more; the trees give no scent of understanding, do not stir in her passing, do not flicker the way they do at home. Usually, she can feel the pulse of magic around her, as discernable as sunlight, wind, the babble of water. Now, she seems to be the only source, and that source is draining.

And it is dark here. She doesn’t like that one bit. Ma used to light candles that never dripped wax, Mom used to enchant them to float over her bed. “Heck of a nightlight,” Ma would say, and Mom would snap her fingers to make them gently change from color to color until she fell asleep.

With great effort and an embarrassing amount of wincing – she reminds herself to never mention this much of a screw up to anyone, although the fact she just saw some version of Ma has her wondering how long she can keep a lid on _that_ situation – she pulls up the sleeve of her armor. The runic compass tattooed there has started pulsing.

“No way.”

 

 

 

 

 

The tattoo was Ma’s idea. Mom was…not a fan, but as with all things, Ma eventually convinced her, and her daughter’s intense enthusiasm for the idea had certainly helped. It’d taken a week’s ride north to get to the place. There were faster, more magical ways to get there, but Ma always found a way to make it a more manual exercise. “Up on a horse, wind in my face, zero chance of interdimensional limb loss,” was her preference when Mom would start assembling a portal. She had a story about someone’s leg ending up in another world; they were all silently convinced that this was total fiction and just Ma’s excuse for getting some fresh air, but Mom occasionally gave in and sent her to the stables instead of the salt circle.

The journey took them to Heimili, to a tiny hut in a deep forest. The vǫlva had greeted Ma with a laugh and a warm embrace. Elsa.

“There will be pain,” Elsa had said. “But it will never fade. _Vegvisir_ , the wayfinder. It is a compass. It will always bring you home.”

Ma had rolled up her sleeve. “Same as mine,” she said, revealing her familiar tattoo. “Elsa gave me this before you were born. Led me to you eventually. You’re a teenager now, and your Mom and I decided--”

Elsa had given Ma a look, snorting.

“Okay, _I_ decided and Regina took some _convincing_ , thank you, Elsa, for remembering the specific dynamic of my relationship.” Ma chuckled. “We don’t want you to get lost. Life is meant for wandering, and you’re _particularly_ well-equipped for wandering. This way, you can always find your way home.”

Elsa had taken her bare wrist and laid her wand there. “If you’re ready,” she said, a voice like the kind of snow that melts in your mouth and manages to taste delicious. “We’ll begin.”

Now, in this strange forest devoid of magic, this place she can’t remember, the tattoo is pulsing, glowing blue.

_Home?_

When she emerges from the trees, she is standing on the other side of a road, and a collection of buildings. They’re square shaped, wooden, not quite what she’s used to. Something like the pictures Ma would make come to life, or the ones from Henry's stories. They’ve been painted – one is grey, and its shutters are white. A green building, with brown shutters, and a bright grey door. She can assume these are dwellings. Houses, then.

She has no idea why she is here. Nor does she know why her tattoo is acting up. And most of all, she doesn’t know why she is drawn down these streets, towards one house, a white house, a house she knows she has never seen but seems as clearly drawn to her as she is to it.

Even with the ground covered in a few feet of snow, she can see that the grass here is overgrown, the shrubs wild and ungroomed. The paint is peeling from the front door. When she goes to open it, her hand closes around the knob, and a noise like a thousand trees splitting sends her to her knees. A barrier has burst. She can smell the magic fading all around her – that acrid, burnt scent from a particularly old spell. White ash is falling.

And the door is open.

The girl steps inside.

 

 

 

 

 

There is dust on every surface. Her wet feet stain the foyer, her hand turns grey on the banister from the layer that collects on her fingers as they swipe up. She wants to go upstairs, she needs to. Already, she can feel her wound throbbing at the touch of magic, whatever is dwelling in this place pulling itself around her, swirling the ash and dust that has followed her here, winding itself into her hair, between her fingers, into the spaces of her armor.

A room. She knows it’s this one. This what?

A bed. Thin white linen sheets, and some sort of shape burnt into its surface. Blood? Rust? No, some sort of spell residue. She can’t make out the shape. Her tattoo is buzzing to the point of near pain, just as it does when she walks into the cottage when her mothers are home. But, how could this—

“Emma? Regina?”

A voice from downstairs. Female. The girl’s hand goes to her sword.

“Emma? Is that you?” Feet on the stairs. She hides behind the door, pressing herself against the wall. Through the crack, she watches a dark-haired woman stepping past her, pausing, then looking into the room. “Regina? It’s Snow, I’m only--”

The girl steps out, sword drawn.

The woman gasps, nearly falling over, and then backs up into the wall, her hands up. “Wh-who are you?”

“How do you know their names?

The woman is visibly trembling, her eyes going from the girl’s face to her sword. “Please don’t hurt me. I’m not armed.”

“Just tell me how you know their names.”

A flicker on the woman’s face, a furrowing of her brow as the fear is replaced by something more rational. “How did you get in here? Only Emma and Regina would have been able to break that seal--“

She keeps her sword upright, though she hasn’t pointed it at the woman yet, whose face is confusing to her: there is caution there, but curiosity, too, and somehow…recognition? But she has never seen her before in her life. “Why are you talking about them?”

“This is...impossible." The woman is almost speaking to herself. "It was blood magic. The spell can't be broken by anyone else.”

“I said, how do you know their names?”

She snaps back to attention, her eyes focused on the girl once more. “Emma and Regina?”

“My mothers’ names. How do you know them? Where am I?”

The woman blinks. “Your mothers…” Her expression changes as she studies the girl, and she lets out a laugh, though it’s hard to tell its source. “Goodness,” she whispers, and takes a step closer. “You are the exact mixture of the two of them, aren’t you?”

“You know them.”

“Knew,” the woman says. “I knew them. We thought they were…I mean, we always just assumed…”

The girl sheathes her sword. “They’re not dead.”

“Emma was…” Another laugh, the woman’s eyes filling with tears. “Emma _is_ my daughter.”

And that’s when she knows who the woman is, and that’s when things become abundantly clear.

“You’re Snow White.”

 

 

 

 

 


	8. ii. ǫr

 

 

 

 

 

“Okay, Carrots. Do your worst.”

The redhead grins far too wide for Emma’s amusement and nocks an arrow. “You will look good, _Valkyrja_. You will be thanking me.”

Emma cracks her neck, easily tossing her sword from one hand to the other, swinging it in a clean arc around her wrist. The wonderful thing about unintentionally joining a crazed Viking boot camp is that you start to get really good at things that would look fairly badass in an action movie. “How’s that, Carrots?”

Anna wets her lips and draws back her bow. “For giving you a scar to match the other side of your face.”

From the trees, a disapproving noise. Elsa is perched high in the branches of a particularly straight pine, a trail of slick ice marking where she climbed for her current view. “Do not let her distract you, Emma,” she says. “You need to focus this time.”

Emma licks at the corner of her mouth, tasting the blood that’s dripping from her last attempt. The first thirty or so arrows, and Anna was being careful to aim to only graze the places that were clothed. As time went on and even Elsa’s patience hinted at thinning, Anna decided drawing blood would be more effective. Emma is not sure she agrees, especially considering the scratch currently bleeding under her right eye and the train of curses it inspired. This is the first week they’d graduated from blunt objects to real arrows, and she can’t say it’s been a success.

“I’ve got it.” She assumes the position, sword in the right hand. “I’m ready for you, Carrots.”

“You are not,” Anna says, releasing the arrow, and unfortunately, she is spot on. Emma barely has time to breathe before something sharp scratches her left cheekbone, and the quick sting, the telltale wetness…

“ _Carrots!_ Come on, dude!” Her hand goes to her face, unsurprised when it comes away with fresh blood. “Do you have any idea how many times my face has been seriously messed up since I got here?”

“I will fix it,” Elsa starts, but Emma shakes her head.

“She broke it, she buys it,” she says, pointing to Anna.

Anna is already doubled over laughing. Something Emma has learned about the redhead is that she is _shockingly_ cheery to a fault and laughs at nearly everything. Certainly not her initial impression of the very muscular, very intense shieldmaiden, but that’s the whole “other world” thing for you – nobody’s book really matches their cover.

“Emma,” Elsa says, slightly more weight to her tone, and Emma doesn’t need to look to imagine her expression. “You must--”

“I know, I know. I can’t draw on the seiðr unless I concentrate.” She throws a look at Anna, still smirking triumphantly, clearly enjoying this way too much, and grins. “ _Slápr._ ”

Anna laughs. “ _Vargdropi_.”

“Hey! My old man was a law-abiding man and you know it.”

“He should have taught you to fight, then.”

“This is not about fighting,” Elsa says, eternally the exasperated teacher putting the unruly schoolchildren on separate ends of the playground. “This is about Emma’s control. She can do this. Distractions are not helpful.”

“The battlefield is distracting,” Anna counters. “An opponent is distracting.” Then she rattles off another list of things, assumedly distractions, in her mother tongue, of which Emma only catches a few bits. Her command of the Heimili language, which she’s started to learn is a combination of a few different things she might have read about in her own world, is…well, she was never god’s gift to languages. But once she caught on to Carrots’ love of shit-talking, she knew she had to keep up. And helping Carrots with her English, even if it is not always G-rated content, is always a plus. “A Valkyrja must master the fight _and_ the seiðr.”

Elsa sighs. “You are right. But she is not ready.”

“She has to be.” Anna grunts between words, as she has another arrow flying before she even finishes the sentence. Emma swings too late, shifting her body and narrowly avoiding the arrow’s sting this time. But the arrow is lodged in the tree behind her, and Anna is frowning. Still not the desired result.

“Emma,” Elsa says, a cold gale descending from her perch to stir Emma’s hair in a not-pleasant way, a reminder of the direness of the hour. “Go back to the last time it happened. What were you thinking of?”

Well, that’s easy.

 

 

 

 

A month ago, and Emma had been washing in the river. It had a name that Emma could not pronounce – she thought it sounded a bit like sneezing. Anna was sunbathing, topless as usual, snoring gently as she napped on a wide flat rock that had been claimed as her favorite long before Emma ever got there. There were still bits of mud on Emma’s shoulders from that day’s training, stained with trails of her sweat, but she’d come to figure out that on this side of a portal, there was nothing better than the freezing water for aching muscles. It could give a cheeseburger a run for its money, that was for sure.

She’d gone underwater to run her hands through her hair, half of it newly shorn off by the careful blade of Anna’s dagger. The shieldmaiden had braided it in front of the fire a few weeks after she’d arrived, yanking it into place unceremoniously, tying up the ends with leather. Emma still tried to clear the mud and blood from the unbraided ends when she could, submerged in the deepest part of the river. When she surfaced, an arrow had narrowly missed the top of her head. Another one came hissing through the air, and Anna was already flying from rock to rock, half-naked, sword retrieved and swinging as she screamed one of her very effective shieldmaiden screams.

Emma was not feeling as shrieky, but mostly she was annoyed. Both nude and unarmed, slogging across a river to get her sword from where it was hanging from a tree on the opposite shore. Not ideal at all. Who is rude enough to disturb a perfectly good bath with their bullshit attempts at murder?

Draugrs, it turned out.

Which was becoming typical. Emma was now getting used to the buggers. Not unlike cockroaches, she’d picked up on that from her first encounter. For example, if you see one, you’re about to see a hundred. A few trying to pick you off during your daily version of a shower was not anything to be unexpected, not as Elsa explained it. Now that the rift in space and time had been formed – or _something_ , Emma was never getting the full story on that situation -- the fuckers were pouring out of Hel. Essentially, Emma should not only assume she was not going to see another fizzing bath bomb in her life, but she should consider draugr arrows to be the routine replacement.

In this case, an arrow had nicked her shoulder. Not life-threatening, but not cute. When she finally got her hand on her sword, there was a nasty-looking draugr coming at her with serious speed. She leapt, swung, and took the thing in the side.

And she doesn’t know why – maybe it’s because she was awkwardly naked, maybe it’s because the sunlight was actually lovely that afternoon, maybe it’s because the draugr was moaning like the right spot was being hit – she thought of Regina. She thought of Regina somewhere that was nearly as beautiful as here when not overrun by the undead, and the way her eyes looked in light like this, the way they’d looked when the sunlight had flickered through her bedroom.

Something happened.

Her body filled with warmth. Time slowed down – she could see the draugr reeling backwards, but it was taking forever, and their swords were barely moving through the air. The water splashing up from the river hung all around them in single droplets. Emma, in all her twenty first century glory, instantaneously made the unglamorous reference with sheer delight. _This is some Matrix shit._

The warmth in her veins grew nearly excruciating – heat, cold, both at once, and a force like something was trying to rip its way out of her. She saw the draugr’s body bursting open like…well, kind of like popcorn, if she was being perfectly honest, but it was happening slowly, and then she was turning to the other two, and it wasn’t entirely her decision to split the other draugr like she was cracking open a lobster – was she hungry? a lot of food metaphors were happening - but that was exactly what was happening.

The feeling of being ripped open was starting to get painful, and then she forced it back down, she thought of the sunlight on those white sheets, a hand pressing into them, and everything sped up again.

The draugr had all dropped to the ground in various pieces, most of their rotting chest cavities burst open, and Emma found herself standing still very unclothed in the shallow of the river, sword glowing, a shieldmaiden now covered in draugr insides staring with her mouth hanging open.

“ _Svanhvít_ ,” Anna said, dropping her sword.

“I, uh… _yeah_.”

“That is why you are legend.” Anna began laughing hysterically, knocking one of the inside-out draugr with her toes, gleefully wiping the gore from her face. “The Valkyrja lives!”

“I don’t know how I did that.”

“That is seiðr.”

“That is…insane.”

“We will tell Elsa. Elsa will show you.” Anna smirked. “I was afraid you would never remember that you are a Valkyrja. Finally.”

And one way or another, that’s essentially what she did.

 

 

 

 

Anna whistles from across the clearing. “Be prepared, _vargdropi_.”

The sunlight on the pillow. Dark hair tangled between her fingers. A muffled noise and teeth biting down on her shoulder.

Anna has already let the arrow loose. Emma knows this because she can _feel_ it, because when she adjusts her body and opens herself the way Elsa has shown her, the way the memory allows, the seiðr pulses, flickers, and then leaps like wildfire. Time slows. The arrow approaches her, and its path to her is clear, clear enough to draw up her sword and easily split it down the middle. When she lets go, there is dark ash at her feet from the remains of the arrow.

Anna is cheering, her bow raised in the air. “ _Vargdropi!_ You are a Valkyrja yet!”

There is a slight comedown to such an intense bond with seiðr, and Emma feels herself wobble slightly, but she keeps herself upright.

“Good,” Elsa says, smirking from her tree. “And you used bruni, Emma.”

“Yeah,” Emma says, rubbing the back of her neck. “Sure did.”

Actually, Emma sure did _not_ use bruni. But that’s the problem with seiðr – it’s not like the magic Regina was teaching her way back when, ready to do as it was told, easily governed by rules. It’s a wild animal she’s not even close to taming, but the times it gives her the privilege of riding it, well. This kind of power is like nothing she’s ever known.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t love it. Every time she does manage to get even the slightest touch of the stuff, she thinks of Regina, and how much Regina would have leapt at the chance to feel something like this, something so rare and raw. But thoughts of Regina are dangerous ones. Every time she remembers in detail, something around the hut tends to catch fire or go flying into the ceiling. Even the times she holds back, just focuses on a glance, teeth catching a bottom lip, a smile, a laugh, a few words that had made her stomach tumble – those just ache for the distance between then and now.

 

 

 

 

See, it’s been nearly two months since some future version of Emma showed up and essentially told her to wait around…and wait around is more or less what she’s done. Well, cleared out any number of tombs of recently reawakened draugr, aided a few troll villages in repairing draugr damage, done endless amounts of training under the watchful eye of Elsa and the all-too-amused Anna, but otherwise waited around.

Two months without word from anyone.

Two months without any other future visitors.

Just Emma, a vulva who can build things from ice, and a very tattooed shieldmaiden hellbent on giving her shin splints.

But this was what Elsa had warned. The same day as the first draugr attack, this was what had been explained while she was still lying on her back being painstakingly repaired via seiðr: there was a danger in creating rifts between worlds. Dangers like time unwinding itself, moving slower in some worlds while speeding up in others. When the worlds became too distant from each other, their paces out of sync, it would be impossible to travel between them. Whatever side of the portal you found yourself in, that was where you’d be trapped.

For her, that means playing Valkyrie until the foreseeable future. Not thinking about the fact that she would have assumed some sort of rescue party should have shown up by now. Not thinking about the fact that Regina has yet to appear through some magic cloud of smoke and yank her back to her bed and make everything okay again.

So for now, Emma has to save herself. Wait for someone else to tell her what to do, or wait for her daughter to show up again, whatever comes first. In the meantime, she’s getting very impressive guns. She’s learning to control her magic. She’s beating Anna at training about a third of the time - much better than getting her ass beat without fail when they first started. She’s even getting used to stews involving four-legged creatures she never before intended to eat. And having arrows aimed at her head for the purpose of teaching her to becoming the Valkyrie everyone keeps saying she is? Typical. These days, it’s typical.

 

 

 

 

 

Emma wipes at the blood on her cheek, finally drying, glancing at the ash beneath her bare feet.

“That good enough for everyone? Maybe we can call this one a day.”

“Yes,” Anna says, setting down her bow. “Now we may pause.”

Emma, who has been up since sunrise having arrows aimed at her head just to pull this single task off, just about collapses in happiness right there. “Really?”

Anna grins again. “No.”

She sets down her bow and quiver, and then pulls off her tunic, all her blue tattoos on full display. Emma sighs, dropping her hands to her knees as she bends over.

“Please don’t say _rás_.”

“ _Rás!_ ” comes Anna’s triumphant yell, and then she takes off into the forest at full speed.

 

 

 

 

 _Rás_ , as Emma has learned, seems to mean either “race” or “running”. Either way, it marks the point at which Anna and Emma will need to sprint as fast as possible through the fantastical Viking version of the world’s most intense and dangerous obstacle course. The first time Anna had made Emma join her on this run, Emma had ended up with a sprained ankle at the bottom of a gulch that took a whole day of Elsa’s work to repair. Now she keeps up with relative ease, but she still doesn’t love the experience. Anna’s unbelievably fast, especially when she’s not loaded down with her shield and weapons, and she loves to change up the route to keep Emma on her toes. Emma has explained many times to her that she would make a killing as a celebrity trainer back in her world.

“The great warrior clan of the Kardashians, they would use my services, yes?”

Emma will nod with all the seriousness she can muster. She may or may not be recounting episodes of reality television that she can remember under the guise of heroic tales. “Oh yeah, for sure.”

“Kim and her sisters will see great victory by my side. We will paint their faces in the blood of their enemies.”

“Very cute. She will love that.”

And then Anna will look pleased with herself for a good long while.

 

 

 

 

Evening finds her down at the river, her usual spot. There’s a version of fireflies here she knows they don’t have in her world - for one thing, they change color, some gold, some green, some even flickering between a dusty pink and violet before disappearing into the trees on the other side. She likes the things that remind her how out of place she is. A stranger. As long as she’s the trespasser in this world, there’s still a world to go back to, a person…

A firefly combusts with a squeal. Emma winces. She needs to stop thinking about Regina with this much seiðr around.

The sound of crickets and frogs, though, and the cool rush of the water - that brings her right back to weekend camping with a short-lived foster family, and sometimes the sea, but the sea...there are more specific things she associates with that water. She eyes the nearest firefly, taking pity, and turns her mind back to what’s in her hands.

A twig snaps behind her, and she freezes, instinctively grips her knife tighter, but a familiar redhead is already sitting down next to her, dropping her bare feet in the water.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on a Valkyrie, Carrots. I could have done some damage.”

Anna snorts. “I would pay good coin to see that.” She nudges Emma in the shoulder. “What are you doing?”

Emma holds up the knife Anna leant her weeks ago, the hunk of wood she’s attempting to carve into a...horse? Sure, a horse. “Whittling.”

Anna makes a face, cocking her head. “Whittling?”

Emma snorts. “Jeez, I didn’t say I was good at it.”

“I learned a new word in your tongue. ‘Whittling’. What does it mean?”

She holds up the knife and wood. “What do you _think_ it means?”

“To carve wood… _badly_.”

Emma knocks her in the side. “The Valkyrie powers are about to jump out on you.”

Anna grins, shrugging. “You are not so helpless now. Well, for a human you are not so helpless. For a Valkyrja though…”

“Yeah, I know. I’m not living up to my legend. Trust me, this is par for the Emma Swan course. Back in my last world, they called me Savior. And did I do much saving?” She shrugs. “ _Allegedly._ I think my latest disappearing act has probably sealed the deal for them. By now, I’m going to assume they know about Regina and me. Maybe even the kid. And if that’s true, then I don’t think they’re rolling out the welcome wagon.”

“Why? You have bound yourself to the queen in the south. You have chosen your path. Why would they frown on this?”

“Did you ever, uh… _hear_ about the queen in the south? They called her the Evil Queen. That wasn’t just them being cute.”

Anna rolls her eyes. “You southerners are so dramatic.”

“Who kills people topless with a sword and an axe, Carrots? That seems pretty dramatic to me.”

“The path to power is always bloody. We knew of her kingdom, and other kingdoms like hers. Such places are brutal. It is their way. She could not have held that title and been benevolent. She would not have held it for long.” Anna reaches into the air, snatches a firefly. Cups her hands and holds it out in front of her, its blue and green light flicking between her fingers. “You know what your queen is now. That is who you love.”

Emma’s hand nearly slips. Anna chuckles, releases the firefly into the night. “Am I wrong?”

“We’d only really been together for three weeks.” She clarifies when she sees the shieldmaiden’s look. “Less than a moon.”

“And already she is with child?” Anna slaps her on the back with one of those insane shieldmaiden paws of hers. “Impressive, Valkyrja. You are as virile as the all-father.”

Emma blushes at that. “Okay, okay, all very unintentional, trust me. I typically prefer hitting at least a few anniversaries before bringing a kid into it.”

Anna shrugs. “Seiðr.”

“Is that what it was?”

“You would call it, hmph,” Anna makes a face. “ _Love_. Your people are obsessed. I have heard some of your tales. They are…I believe the word is _mushy._ ”

“Mushy?”

“Pathetic, perhaps. But love is a kind of seiðr. Maybe older. Maybe more powerful.” She makes a noise, the same one she makes when she knows she is right. “Yes, you are in love. This is why you come to the river, and carve badly, and look into the water. It is pathetic, but that is how you are. You are in love.”

"Really reading me to filth, Carrots.”

Anna gives her a crooked grin. “I can only read runes, _Vargdropi_. But I am right.”

“Yeah,” Emma says, and she considers the rough shape of the horse, a very lost cause, before tossing it into the river. “You are.”

Anna grunts and makes a grab for the little figure, snatching it out of the air and tossing it back to Emma. Those Viking reflexes continue to be insane. “Do not give up,” she says, and it could be about the terrible horse, or it could be about everything else, too. She gets to her feet, giving Emma a final tap on the shoulder. “You will live up to your legend, Valkyrja. I know it.”

“I’m glad someone does.”

“I am not the only one. When the time comes, there will be many more than Elsa and I by your side.”

“Is that part of that prophecy of yours?”

Anna only smirks, and turns to the forest. “Good night, Emma.”

“Sleep tight,” Emma says.

“Do not let the draugrs bite,” Anna finishes the phrase Emma recently taught her, and chuckles, and then goes back up the path to the hut.

A firefly bursts with a squeal over the water. Emma really needs to stop thinking about Regina like _that_.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a vargdropi means "son of a criminal", and is a lightly insulting name (well, I suppose we will leave it up to the vikings to decide how insulting it actually was)  
> a slápr means "good for nothing lazy person" and i encourage you to use this is bed next time you run out of ideas  
> these are in old icelandic. heimili's language dips in and out of old norse, swedish, danish, icelandic, etc. fantasy vikings, you know how they are...


	9. ii. جن

 

 

 

 

 

The last rays of daylight are retreating from the town carved into the desert outcrop. From the highest point of the butte to the tents at the foot of the formation, shielding the traders and the goat pens alike, the sun is replaced by glowing blue lights, whispered awake by the locals. During their first evenings here, Regina had watched the ritual with intensity. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed the constant presence of magic when she was in Storybrooke, magic that didn’t come from her and her alone, magic whose source was in their surroundings, incorporated into the society itself. The lights, stirred awake by a simple spell, had brought tears to her eyes the first time, and Henry had touched her arm, said nothing, stood beside her as the spots of blue had gently trailed down the spire and lit up the entire cliff.

Tonight, she looks down from the balcony and notices how slow the progress goes - even in a few months, even with such a small effort of magic, there are fewer who are capable. A handful of lights cannot be stirred awake at all, and there are spots where the darkness falls and stays, and torches are lit instead, villagers calling out to each other where there are gaps.

She frowns. She has thought about going and doing it herself - it is no longer a secret that the guest of Yasmin is a magic wielder, nor that she and her son are a long way from their home - but Yasmin has still warned her against demonstrating her true power, and she’s agreed. And as her fingers spark unpredictably once more, leaving a shimmering red stain on the stone where her hand has just laid, she’s not sure even turning on a light wouldn’t be slightly disastrous.

A scuffle far below, dust stirred up in the blue glow, and then nothing. Regina peers over the edge of her balcony, eyeing the place where the sand now settles, and waits. But there is no more sound, no more movement. Just the soft bleats of goats, and the shimmer of sand snakes returning to their nests.

She hears familiar laughter, sure of its source, and leans out into the air.

“Henry! Come home.”

Her son’s head appears from a few balconies below, grinning up at her like his other mother. The other occupants of the balcony are neighbors around his age, younger boys and girls who aren’t old enough yet to have their own snakes, but still run up to the spire at the top of the butte to serve as lookouts. Henry spends most of his late afternoons there, perched on the wooden parapet, or following Yasmin around like a puppy, asking about her snake Raja, trying to get her to take him for rides. Evening will find him on one balcony or another, eating dates and learning languages, telling stories ripped from his favorite books at home. Currently, the occupants of Burj are about midway through a retelling of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, though Henry has decided that Draco Malfoy is the real hero, and can also enlist the help of the Millenium Falcon when needed.

“Can do,” he says, swinging his leg over the ledge and slipping into the footholds carved into the side of the cliff, but she lets out a disapproving noise, shaking her head.

“The _other_ way home,” she calls, and he groans, jumps back onto the balcony.

“Coming,” he says. She smirks, just for herself.

 

 

 

 

 

She had initially been worried about the adjustment. Henry has never spent extended time on this side of a portal - this was her world, not his, though if she was being honest, her own reaction to being back in the land of her birth worried her, too. She knows who she was here. She knows the distance from that person and who she has become. More than anything, she knows the bargains she made with herself when she crossed over and sold all of her that was left to Storybrooke, to make herself forget as much of the old world as possible, to erase what she’d loved.

Those bargains had cast her past life in brutally negative light. Who would want feudalism when they could have HGTV instead? Hadn’t she traded bloodshed for...bedspreads? Indoor plumbing? Pizza delivery? Weren’t those enough? Hadn’t she told herself there was nothing left for her here?

And now she finds herself pausing more often than not, watching the sun rising over a sea of rose gold sand, or kneeling in the garden the village keeps in the oasis. In those moments, she thinks to herself that yes, there is something to this life that she hadn’t expected to remember. Something she hadn’t expected to play to her heart so immediately and intensely. It’s not peaceful - she would never mistake it for that, not with Henry just arriving from an adventure on the skirts of a sandstorm with his hair crusted and a bruise up his side, not with the reports of caravan raids and snake riders who don’t come home from their missions, not with the landscape that is as brutal as it is beautiful. A child strays from the oasis and never returns. A watering hole is cut off when Sofia’s men take it for themselves, and supplies begin to run low. Yasmin has a fire within her that Regina admires, even tries to mentor, but she also sees that its source is desperation as much as it is righteous passion. These small things together are reminders that this is no place to get comfortable, but still. _Still._

Traders bring magicked wares to the town, scrolls that tell stories in wry papery voices, gold lanterns that multiply in a dusty circle around a traveler, toys that dance and talk and spin. The sand snakes’ scales are warm to the touch. At dawn and dusk, a man a few balconies over sings, and his voice makes something inside her twist with promise.

Henry loves it here. Openly, loudly. He loves that every star is visible in the night sky. He loves his new friends, all of them fascinated with him, all of them hanging on his every word. For all the danger in this world, for everything she cannot shield him from entirely, he is young enough to think of it as an adventure. And for that she is eternally grateful. It makes her feel less guilty for the things she has come to love here, too. For the feeling when she’d finally adjusted, when she’d looked up one day at some small thing, a magic light, a smell of spice in the air, and had been hit so heavily with the feeling of coming home.

Of course, all of this is still run through with one distinct loss. But she will not say her name out loud. In this world, at least, she remembers the magic that names may carry. And she is terrified of what might be unleashed should she speak with intent the word that stands for the one she loves.

 

 

 

 

 

Henry’s long been asleep by the time Regina notices. Spending part of the evening on her balcony has become a habit; she shares Henry’s wonder at the night sky here - even in Storybrooke, the stars were not so bright or plentiful, and as she searches for the familiar constellations, she cannot see them, realizing here they are entirely different than in the other world.

Sulitan and Yasmin had given them rooms of their own, an apartment of sorts, if these chambers carved into the cliff could be called that. They had their own place to sleep, a balcony to cook on, a small space to live. A curtain divided them from their home and the halls that ran between the other families’ spaces - Regina had placed a spell there to block sound, though it was prone to fizzling out at certain times now that her magic had a mind of its own. A mind that believes there are no coincidences.

So tonight, when she hears scuffling in the hall, it may be for a reason. And when she draws the curtain aside to look, when she sees it is a familiar figure trailing a group all with their hoods drawn, she should not be surprised.

Yasmin is covert, certainly, but not covert enough for a former queen who is used to dealing in darkness. There have been too many times when a conversation has hushed when Regina has entered the room. Yasmin goes down to the traders as they arrive at the spire, but what she deals with them is less clear. Regina knows how to read suspicious activity. The girl has suspicion raised all over herself, though she does a decent enough job of hiding it. Unfortunately for her, she is hiding it from someone who has spent most of their existence constructing a life from secrets.

“Going somewhere?”

Yasmin pauses, the young woman’s back stiffening before she turns in place. The rest of the group disappears without her, and Yasmin takes too long to relax her body, meeting Regina’s eye with some reluctance. But then the reluctance hardens over, the familiar burn of determination returning, and she is a princess once more.

“Regina,” she says, smiling. “You are up late.”

“So are you.”

“Ah.” The young woman shrugs. “I am not suited for mornings. I prefer to do what I need to do in the evening."

“And what do you need to do tonight?”

Yasmin continues to smile at her. But two can play at this game, Regina thinks, particularly a princess and a queen.

“Is Henry asleep? Perhaps you should return to your quarters.”

“Is that where you’re going? To bed?”

“Yes,” Yasmin says, nods too quickly. “I am.”

“Then you’re going the wrong way, Yasmin.” She points in the opposite direction. “Your room is back there.”

“So it is.” She runs her tongue over her teeth, studying the other woman. “Regina, I don’t know what you thought you saw--”

“Your friends?”

Yasmin’s smile twitches. “My friends. Of course.”

“Or are they more of your associates?”

“I think it would really be best if you went back to your bed, Regina.”

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“Then I would order you to return to your bed, Regina.”

“You can’t order a queen, dear.”

The young woman stops smiling, approaches Regina and then takes her by the arm, ushering her back into Regina’s quarters with the curtain closing behind them.

“What do you want, Regina?”

“The truth.”

“Where exactly did you detect a lie?”

“Do you not trust me?”

“This isn’t a matter of trust.” Yasmin sighs. Her eyes fall on the entrance to their sleeping quarters, where Henry is currently sprawled out of sight. “It’s more to do with safety.”

“Ours?”

“Yes, yours. My father and I have sworn to protect you both to the extent we can.” She makes a face. “With your cooperation, of course. It’s easier when you are not… _headstrong_.”

“Headstrong runs in the family, I’m afraid.”

“What I need to deal with this evening is time sensitive. It’s very important I return to what I was doing.”

“What is it you need to deal with?”

“You’re really not going to stop asking, are you? I see we could both ask each other about trust.”

Regina lets out a soft laugh. “Oh, I don’t trust you at all. You remind me too much of someone. Secrets on secrets.”

Yasmin looks at her for a long time, eyes narrowed, before finally sighing. “Fine. If you must know, we are dealing with an assassin.”

 

 

 

 

 

On the walk further into the spire, descending into the lowest part of the rock, Yasmin explains that she is not as much a refugee princess as she is a princess who also leads an underground movement to overthrow the reign of Sofia the Great and reclaim Cordova.

None of this is actually that much of a surprise to Regina. If there’s anything she knows about her family, extended or not, it’s that they have a proclivity to leadership of the most rebellious kind.

Yasmin also explains that this evening, an assassin was thwarted in his attempt to kill Sulitan, and likely Yasmin herself. It is clear that Sofia is aware of their location now and the fact they are still alive, and is trying to finish them off quietly before they can become a threat. Yasmin makes it very clear she will not succeed.

“We are not leaving. I refuse to surrender our position. She can send as many as she wants, and I will send her back every single one of their hands if she is so determined. Let her measure sacrifice if she feels like it.”

Regina looks at the woman out of the corner of her eye, not daring to smirk. But oh, she very much wants to smirk.

 

 

 

 

 

In the bowels of the spire, carved deep into the rock behind tunnel after meandering tunnel, a small room is full of activity. Two hooded figures kneeling, another in front, holding a blunt club. When Yasmin enters the room, they all stand at attention, and Regina realizes just how much respect the tiny woman commands. The urge to smirk returns, but it is fast drowned out by the sight of the man chained to the wall, his face swollen and bleeding, his leg bent at an unnatural angle.

“How is our guest?” Yasmin asks, stepping around the others to pull something from the wall.

“Quiet,” one of the hooded figures says.

“Still refusing to speak?” She bends down to look the man in the eye, and he spits on her, saying something in a language Regina does not understand. She knows it was not friendly. “You had a very bad fall leaping from that balcony. I’m afraid it did not have the intended effect. Next time you want to silence yourself with death, ask your queen to provide you with poison. Don’t waste our time trying to keep you alive if you have nothing to offer.” Yasmin wipes the spit from her face, run through with blood, and frowns. “I will give you another chance, but only this once. Then I will grant your wish.”

Regina stands against the wall, her stomach knotting. She knows Yasmin’s men are glancing at her, unsure of why she is here, but she sees only this man and the small woman crouching in front of him.

The man says something else, spits again, and looks at the floor.

“Fine,” Yasmin says, getting to her feet, and then nods to the man holding him. “Kill him.”

“No!” Regina feels herself stepping forward before she knows what she’s doing. Her hand is sparking, dribbling red across the floor, and she knows their eyes have shifted to her fingers, alarm on their faces. “You can’t do that.”

Yasmin raises an eyebrow. A challenge. “Can’t I?” She holds up a hand to the men, and then takes Regina by the elbow, steering her out of the room. 

“Yasmin, this is not necessary.”

“He came with the intent to kill my father. On Sofia’s orders.”

“And we don’t need to stoop to their level.“

“What should I do with him? Release him into the desert? He’ll die, or come back to finish the deed. Or should we imprison him here? Take precious food and water from the hands of our children? Use their medicine to heal him? You would have me risk their lives to keep him alive. And for how long? I know you were queen once. You know the decisions that must be made.”

“I just think there is a way to do this without blood on our hands.”

Yasmin looks at Regina, and it hits her just how _young_ the woman is, how she is still a girl in so many ways, and Regina knows all too well herself what it is to have been given a crown, a level of authority, and have that be the thing that raises you faster than a parent ever could. “You’ve forgotten what it is to be royal, Regina.” Yasmin holds up her palms. “We were born with blood on our hands.”

She tries to be firm. No, she has not quite forgotten her royalty yet. “Don’t kill him.”

“Regina.”

“He’s a bargaining chip, isn’t he? Why can’t we use him as leverage against the queen?”

“She doesn’t respond to such things. Trust me.”

“Can he be useful to us? We need more laborers--”

“He dove from a balcony to kill himself when we caught him. His leg is broken, his ribs snapped. Who knows if he is bleeding internally, what else has been destroyed. Whatever other injuries he has, he is useless until they are healed. The effort to heal him is an effort we can’t afford.”

“But there has to be some way to avoid killing him.”

“You already know the answer to that.”

“I will take responsibility for him.”

Yasmin snorts. “Will you? There is a roof over your head from my father’s generosity alone.”

“Give me a day to decide what to do with him. I promise, I’ll find a solution--”

“He will die from his injuries before you get the chance. There is no need for a solution now.”

“I can heal him.” Regina feels her magic springing up again, spilling out from her hands. “You must let me heal him.”

“Fine.” Yasmin puts up her hands. “You keep telling me you want to be useful. I tell you to control your sihr, to leave the diplomacy to me. You want to interfere? Fine. His fate is in your hands now. But whatever the consequences of his living? That is in your hands, too.”

“I understand.”

“Then he is yours.” Yasmin goes back to the door to the other room, but stops first, turns to Regina. “And in the future, don’t question my authority in front of my men. I know I’m young, but I’m not a child, cousin.”

Regina nods breathlessly, balls her hands into fists to quench the magic. Goes back to her room for herbs, the mixtures she’s been making to keep busy, and feels her heart in her throat the whole ascent.

 

 

 

 

 

The hooded men are standing outside the room when she returns, nodding when she enters. She senses their tension when she passes, and she doesn't blame them -- the strange guest of their leader offering to heal a murderer, and for a purpose that is not clear, perhaps not even to Regina herself. Now, under Yasmin's orders, they must let her inside. Leaving her alone with the would-be assassin and his chains.

The man looks up at her, and when he meets her gaze she sees the bruise forming fast around his eye, the mess of his swollen face. With some effort, he nods at her. “Thank you,” he breathes out, blood drooling from the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t thank me. I am not your ally.”

“You showed mercy.”

“But not forgiveness. Remember that.” She puts the damp cloth to the side of his face, sorts through the herbs in her lap. She can feel him staring at her, the intensity of his look. He is studying her, she knows that.

“You are not like these sand dogs,” he says. “Who are you?”

She frowns, making sure her disgust is evident. “These ‘sand dogs’ saved your life.”

“No, _you_ did. And you are not from this place, that is clear.” He takes a deep but labored breath. "Why would you save my life, knowing my actions?"

"Where I come from, an eye for an eye is no longer considered a civilized policy."

"Then you understand that these are not civilized people." He winces as she applies the paste to the cut in his forehead. “You do not need to align yourself with them. I will tell the queen of your actions and you will find yourself in her favor.”

She knows he has seen the occasional spurts of magic spilling onto her lap, sparking in his hair as she works the herbs into his wounds. “She has no favors for my kind.”

“Well, she won’t offer you a place at her court, no. But she will allow you safe passage. She will pay handsomely for good information.” He wheezes for a moment. She will need to look for internal damage, but that will involve magic. “She would be very interested in you, I think.”

“I’m afraid I’m not the kind of person she wants to ally herself with.”

“Because of your magic?”

“Because I don’t ally myself with genocide.”

He has nothing to say to this, not for a moment. But after the pause, he tilts his chin up, and forces her to meet his eye. “Mercy can be a weakness, too. Wherever you came from, that might not have been the case. But you are in the desert now. You may not make this mistake again.”

 

 

 

 

 

In the early hours of morning, the prisoner escapes. Or, he kills two of his captors, gets as far as the goat pens, and is shot in the back by one of the archers who manages to get to his balcony in time. Regina watches them carrying the bodies of the two men away, a mother crying, their blood trailing down the hall. Yasmin looks at Regina only once, no meaning lost in her expression, and turns away.

Regina tells Yasmin she will pay for their burial, provide for their family. Yasmin reminds her that she has no currency, no wealth in this world.

Regina want to speak to the rest of Yasmin’s group. Yasmin tells her that she will no longer allow the risk.

And then, Yasmin does not speak to her for two weeks. Regina feels the weight of all this like a fist in her throat, hiding it from Henry, still grinning with his friends as he climbs up the side of the butte, still untouched by what his hero does in the deep belly of the spire. This is not our fight, she reminds herself. This is not our world.

Yet the sunrise makes her stomach spin, her heart ache like a thousand loves returned. If this is not her world, whose is it?

 

 

 

 

 

Sulitan is in his room when she finds him, painting a tiny figure of a giraffe. She has learned over the past few months that he was loved as a leader for his demeanor, his natural kindness, but perhaps not his shrewdness or his thirst for power. This, she has decided, was reserved for his daughter.

“That’s beautiful,” she says. "Quite the hobby."

“Oh, I’ve made dozens. I must keep myself occupied. The loss of court intrigue still weighs on me.” He chuckles, setting down the animal among a pile of others. “How can I help you, cousin?”

“I’ve heard you speak of Jafar. He was your court sorcerer, wasn’t he?”

“Jafar? For a time, yes, but he left Cordova in the months before Sofia’s invasion. I suppose he predicted it, and knew he would be among the first to be put to death.” Sulitan pauses, working the paintbrush between his hands. “He is a hermit now. He last visited us before your arrival, but we have no idea when or if he will return. I do not even know if he is alive.”

“Yasmin said he was powerful.”

“Oh, unrivaled in our lands, and the lands beyond ours, too, I think.” He seems to smile at the memory, but then the smile fades. “But even his sihr waned. As it left our world, it left him, too.”

“So he is powerless now?”

Sulitan chuckles. “Far from it. Before, he could move mountains. Now, perhaps only a palace.” He smiles. “But still, who among us could move a palace?”

“But he is not in a palace anymore.”

“No, he left as we did. I never knew him to be a man without comforts. I do not know how he stands the desert.” He looks at Regina, his eyes searching. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I need to see him.” She holds out her hands, revealing the magic that has stained the lines of her palms. “If he is the only other person with magic like mine, he is the only one who can help me with this.”

“Your sihr is getting worse,” Sulitan says, brow wrinkling. “Even when you first arrived it was not as obvious. Are you well?”

“I know,” she says, sighing. “And yes, I think. But I need answers. Frankly, I need help.”

“Then you must go to Jafar. It is still early enough to leave now - it's only a half day’s journey to him.”

“Where is he, then?”

“A cave carved into a spire not unlike this one.” He gives her a smile, though it is a cautious one. “My daughter would bring you there on Raja, but I believe you are not speaking.”

“It’s a...complicated matter.”

“I do not know what she gets up to,” Sulitan says, sighing. “But I know she is her mother’s daughter. And the daughter of all the women in my family, too. That fire in her blood is difficult to put out.” He looks at Regina, a curious expression on his face. “If what we knew of your kingdom was true, you know such a fire well yourself.”

And Regina only smiles at him. “Thank you, Sulitan."

"Of course, cousin. Do you have a favorite animal?"

"I don't know."

He looks at his animals and then at her, smiling warmly. "Perhaps it will reveal itself in time. All things do, one way or another."

 

 

 

 

 

The sand snake leaves her on the edge of a rocky spire emerging from the desert sands, smaller than the one she now calls her home. A cave entrance is clear, shimmering with any number of recognizable spells for blocking, and Regina is sure there’s more protection than she can make out with the naked eye. She approaches, feeling the sun setting behind her, knowing that if she cannot get in before it is dark, she will have bigger problems than uncontrollable magic.

But then she realizes that there is a hooded man standing at the entrance as she draws closer, and he raises a hand to her at her approach. She can't help but furrow her brow in confusion - has he been waiting all this time?

“I wondered when you would arrive, Regina.”

She pulls back her own hood, raising an eyebrow. “You know who I am?”

“Word travels fast in the desert. And in the stars, too.” He points to the heavens, still bright blue in this light, fast turning from day to night. “The stars knew of you long before we did.”

“I hope you haven't been standing here for ages, then.”

“Not long.” There is a cry overhead, and a falcon dives down, lands on Jafar’s extended arm, wrapped in leather. “Iago saw you coming. I assumed it would be better to greet my guest at the door. I may not be in the court of the caliph anymore, but I still try to keep my manners.”

 

 

 

 

 

“The Cave of Wonders,” Jafar says, spreading his arm out to reveal the glittering interior. Indeed, it’s hard to tell that they are currently standing in a cave in the desert and not the ornate rooms of a palace suite, carpets covered in lush pillows, silk and jewels on the walls, furniture arranged for lounging. A fountain further in the cave bubbles pleasantly. Palm fronds droop down beneath the cave’s massive ceiling. Jafar smiles at his handiwork. “Or at least that’s what I’m calling it. Certainly in a better state than how I found it, I can tell you that much.”

“It’s exquisite,” Regina says, finding herself spinning in a slow circle to take it in. “Is it entirely magic?”

“A few pillows may be the real thing.” Jafar drops himself onto a couch, still smirking. “I’m afraid there wasn’t much I could smuggle out when I left.”

“Sulitan said you left before everyone else.”

“Well, you can imagine who’s going to be the first to lose their heads when an inquisition comes to town.” He draws a finger across his throat, and then pulls on a stray curl of beard. “My head is too handsome to lose its neck.”

When she sits on a pillow across from him, she sees it. The shimmer at his shoulders, the occasional transparency of his fingertips. A powerful illusion, incredibly effective, but not quite enough.

“You aren’t human,” she says, a fact, not a question. He pauses in his beard grooming, cocking his head at her.

“Aren’t I?” He leans forward, tenting his fingers. “Your control of magic is even stronger than I'd thought. Most would not be able to detect it.”

“It’s an impressive illusion, though,” she says, and she does not know why she is not running, why the instinct to protect herself has not kicked in. Despite what could reveal itself to be absolutely terrifying, she feels no fear. “The inconsistencies are extremely subtle.”

“There was a time they were not there at all, and this disguise was impenetrable. But as the sihr leaves the world, that is less the case. Eventually, this illusion will no longer be enough.”

“Is that why you left the palace?”

“Clever,” he says.

“It wasn’t because of Sofia’s invasion, was it? You knew your sihr was fading, and that the illusion would fade, and the court would find you out.”

He smirks again. “You are _very_ clever, my queen.”

“What are you, then?” She leans forward, peering closer at him. He extends a hand, showing her where the fingertips are fading and reforming.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Where I come from, you could be any number of things.”

“I forget you did not spend very much time at the court in Cordova. If you had, your grandmother would have taught you all about me.” There is a puff of smoke, almost comic in its sudden appearance, and then she is sitting across from a man whose skin is blue, with the horns of an antelope in the same bright hue. He smiles, spreading his arms in display.

Regina blinks, trying to hide her surprise. “A jinn.”

“In the flesh,” he says, wiggling his fingers, their consistency changing to wisps of smoke. “Or thereabouts.”

“I’ve never met a jinn. I remember hearing stories--”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. I wouldn’t say our reputation is stellar.”

“A jinn masquerading as a court sorcerer, though? Why?”

“Humans are interesting. Humans that are in charge of other humans are especially interesting. The long life of a jinn is a bit boring otherwise.” He changes back to his human form, lounging back on the couch. “They thought I was the most incredible sorcerer, too. Quite the ego trip.” He looks over at her, smirking again. “So, you didn’t come here to unmask an ancient creature of supernatural prowess, I know that much. Tell me why you sought me out.”

“I need help,” she says, revealing her hands. She flips her palms over, shows him how the magic keeps sparking and fighting her, pooling in her life line, her heart line.

“Well, then. That _is_ interesting.” He sits up, leaning forward to have a closer look. “I have never seen anything like this. Not ever, and my ever is much longer than yours.”

“It’s new for me, too. My magic was never like this. It isn’t the right color, the right consistency...and it fights me constantly.”

“A curse?”

“It doesn’t act like it. Doesn’t feel like it, either.”

“You’re right,” he says, carefully taking her hand in his, studying the magic as it leaps from her fingertips, sputtering onto his own. “This is something else entirely. I can help you, but being a jinn, you must order me to do so.”

“Order you.” She gives him a look. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Oh, it’s nothing special. You say, ‘Find the source of this strange magic’, and there, I’ll find the source because you asked it of me.”

“Well, fine.” Regina takes a deep breath, and then looks the jinn in the eye. “Find the source.”

And with that, magic sweeps over them both like a smack to the face, and knocks her unconscious.

 

 

 

 

 

She comes to on the floor of the cave, her ear pressed into a carpet. Regina raises herself up, sees the jinn still sitting on the couch, looking at her. An old instinct causes her to glare at him.

“What was that?” she snarls.

He looks far too amused by this development. “Well, your highness, that’s how it works. Your order speaks to the sihr I command, not necessarily to me. So when you tell it what to do, it gets right to work and does it.”

She rubs at her head, wincing. “How long does it take?”

“Oh, it’s done. Fulfilling a command is quite instantaneous. Anyhow, I know why your magic isn’t behaving.”

Regina’s eyes go wide. “You do?”

“It’s actually not very complicated.”

She gets to her feet, overwhelmed enough to feel dizzy. He snaps and a chair pulls up behind her, quick enough for her to drop into it. “Tell me,” she says, nearly breathless.

“You are not the source,” he says. “But its source is a person.”

Her heart is racing. “So who is it?”

“Your child.”

She blinks. “But Henry--”

“No,” he says, and reaches forward, indicating her belly with the wisps of his fingertips. “There. It belongs to that child.”

Her mouth is suddenly dry. “What?”

“The child you’re carrying. That is the source of magic, and I will be honest, it is _quite_ the source. Stronger than you or me, if you can believe it. A little prodigy, really.” The jinn is still smirking at her, and he relaxes in his seat, his hands clasped behind his head. “The question is, who in the world is its father? You appear to have found yourself a formidably powerful sire.”

“Mother,” she hears herself say, barely a whisper, unsure of how she formed the words. “Emma.”

 

 

 

 

 


	10. ii. spá

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sky is spitting snow when Emma checks the fishing nets she’d set in the river last week, carefully following Anna’s instructions to make sure nothing tears or unwinds itself. Emma’s prior experiences with fishing involved an arcade game of Bass Pro Hunter at her favorite dive in Somerville - she was pretty darn good at it, in her defense - so she wasn’t surprised when the shieldmaiden had been a bit persnickety about her handling the nets that Anna had spent weeks weaving. She doesn’t protest when Anna gets overly prescriptive about things like hunting or fishing. The first time Emma felled a deer with an arrow, Anna had stared at her in disbelief and a tinge of judgment as Emma sobbed through the process of retrieving it. From then on, the shieldmaiden had limited her to fishing duties, and only after teaching Emma the quickest and most merciful way to kill the little guys.

Sometimes she thinks longingly of a chicken nugget, particularly those of the dollar menu variety, but then she realizes the chicken probably had a worse life than the reindeer whose jerky she has somehow grown to enjoy, and her brain blocks out the craving without much complaint. And despite never before having much of a taste for fish or game, Emma’s found herself salivating over the thought of fresh salmon on many a walk home with Anna. Particularly since once Elsa gets her hands on any fish, they end up rotten, briny, salted, and any manner of disgusting things the girls love to slurp down, much to Emma’s horror.

Emma grins. Four trout are trapped in the net, and she makes quick work of knocking them out and dropping them into her basket.

“If only I had some cheddar biscuits to go with you,” she whispers, and then slings the basket over her shoulder.

It’s not too late in the day but the sun is already setting. She’s noticed the daylight shortening rapidly in the past weeks, and Anna has explained that in another month, most of their hours will be spent in darkness. At first, Emma had been dreading the season - not that New England winters had ever been a party, even with the bonus of hot chocolate and electric blankets and microwavable macaroni and cheese dinners when you were feeling particularly cold and lazy, things that now seem to be as much the product of fantasy as this side of the universe once was to her - but then Anna had started waxing nostalgic about mead and storytime around the fire and something called hyggja, and Emma decided she might as well be on board.

She wasn’t supposed to still be here by winter, though. Every time the sky turns grey and she has to throw on another layer of fur, Emma shivers for reasons that have nothing to do with the temperature.

On the walk back to the hut, she stops at a familiar tree, taking out her knife and leaving a notch next to all the others. Nearly three months. Well, two months, three weeks, and two days. She doesn’t need to count the notches one by one, not when she is painfully aware of the time that’s passed, but she keeps track in this physical record anyhow.

Anna hasn’t seen the tree. Elsa might have something to say about affecting natural spirits with woodland vandalism. Emma does not keep secrets from the sisters, but this she has yet to bring up. She doesn’t know why.

If she hadn’t been told to stay, she would have left immediately. Would have flipped off the shieldmaiden, apologized insincerely to the vulva, explained that they’d got the wrong girl, and gone running straight into whatever disaster she thought might carry her home. If she’s honest, she’d probably be dead. She knows a sign is supposed to come. She knows that prophecies work in mysterious ways, and that time is both impossible to know and yet written by hands unseen.

But _three months_. Regina might know by now. She might need someone to rub her back when she gets nauseous. She might not know why Emma isn’t there yet, might wonder if she’s been abandoned, might wonder if this whole thing is even worth it. Her hair’s probably longer. Her boobs probably look amazing, if Emma’s being honest. She definitely has thought about that a few times and--

A few limbs on the neighboring tree snap in half and crash onto the ground, and Emma winces. The familiar glow of seiðr flickers where they’ve cracked. _Oops._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Call me Ronald McDonald because Filet-O-Fish is back on the menu, ladies.”

The two sisters do not react when Emma walks in and makes this ridiculous announcement, nor do they comment on the basket of fish hanging over her shoulder. She blinks between the two of them, their eyes to the fire in the center of the room, wisps of ice-white seiðr winding themselves between Elsa’s fingers.

“Uh, guys? Everything okay?”

Elsa glances up at her. “There has been a call for the services of a vǫlva.”

Anna nods, not looking up from the flames in the center of the room. “From the hall that was once our father’s.” She pauses. “It is a mead hall like no other. On the edge of the fjǫrðr, carved as if for the all-father himself.” There’s a small smile on the edge of Anna’s lips, but the sadness is evident and huge and Emma knows it well herself, that very specific kind of sadness that comes from longing.

“I don’t think I’m understanding you. Your father’s summoned you?”

“It is not his hall anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“Our family is dead. The land of that jarl has been reclaimed. We are all that is left.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When Elsa’s seiðr first showed itself, our parents were proud. It is an honor to have a vǫlva in the family. They are advisors to jarls, seers of great power. But a vǫlva cannot live in the house of her father. She must reject the bonds of family, wander to where she is needed, and live apart from society. I came with her. Where she goes, I follow.”

They are sitting around the fire, Elsa noticeably stiff, Anna’s hands unusually empty. Emma stares between the two of them, listening. Elsa speaks next.

“I left in my nineteenth winter. Anna’s sixteenth winter. And when we returned…” A frost suddenly sheens on Elsa’s shoulders. “All had been taken from us.”

Anna’s voice is heavy with emotion. “The Weasel murdered our father and mother. Their men. He claimed himself jarl.”

“Anna wanted to fight--”

The shieldmaiden stares into the fire. “I wanted his head. I still want his head.”

“But it is not our place. As vǫlva, I must reject my father’s name. By going with me, she did the same.”

Emma’s mouth is dry. “I don’t know what to say.”

“There is nothing to say.” Elsa’s fingers brush her wand. “It is not uncommon in this land. Not anymore. By our laws, such succession is valid.”

“Is the Weasel his... _real_ name?”

“It is how he is known,” Anna says. “For his cowardice. For the blades he plunges in backs.”

“Why would he call for you now?”

Elsa takes up her wand, presses it into her lap. “It is the role of the vǫlva to offer her services to jarls. Advise in the fortunes of war, in the decisions of the jarl’s court. I am to go where I am needed.”

Emma takes a deep breath. “It sounds like a trap, if I’m honest.”

“He knows we have no claim to his title. I am no threat. Anna isn’t either, if she behaves.”

A grunt from Anna. Emma studies them both, a bit shocked by their shared resignation.

“So you’re going.”

Emma notices how white Anna’s knuckles are as they form fists. “We are going.”

Elsa shrugs. “If I am called, I have to answer.”

“Fine.” Emma slaps her knee. “I’m coming, too.”

“Emma, I don’t think that’s a good--”

“If it’s not a trap, I get to stretch my legs and keep Carrots from decapitating anyone. If it _is_ a trap, you have an extra pair of hands to help with the decapitating.”

Anna grins at this. Elsa sighs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They leave the next morning before dawn, Anna leading Elsa astride a particularly slow and unconcerned reindeer, Emma bringing up the rear. The sisters are quieter than usual, and Emma is all too aware that what they are about to walk into is something she's had to stare down too many times in her own life -- a past that stings when you dare yourself to face it head on. She can't overlook the way Anna's jaw is set as she walks, how Elsa's fingers weave frost into the reindeer's antlers with particular intensity. Emma decides they are all deserving of a distraction. It’s a day’s journey to the town, and Emma’s already blown through most of her journey-appointed snacks within the first hour, finishing off nearly all her jerky and some of the salted fish. She pauses mid-chew as they make their way down the side of a steep hill.

“Obviously I couldn’t make us a roadtrip playlist, so instead I’m just going to sing the songs I _would_ have picked out at the top of my lungs.”

Elsa raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to be very hoarse by the time we get there.”

Anna looks over her shoulder, grinning like a kid grateful for the excuse as she belts out: “Do not stop believing! Hold on to the feeling!”

“Not in fact a roadtrip song, Carrots, but I like that enthusiasm. Okay, we’re starting with a classic. Hold onto your hats.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the other end of a dark day, the group arrives just beyond a village on the outskirts of the jarl’s territory, Anna now humming jovially, much to Emma's relief. She stops as they come to a halt, helping her sister off her mount. “But Emma, you must explain this to me. Miley puts her hands up when they play her song and the butterflies go away. Are the butterflies in your world pests? Are they attracted to a dream and cardigan? And what is cardigan? This ritual she performs, nodding her head and moving her hips, is this meant to dispel butterflies?”

Elsa hushes them both before Emma can respond.

“We need to make camp here,” she says, indicating the round shapes of moss beneath the birches, blindingly white even in the dusk.

Emma gestures towards the lights of the village. “We’re not going to get an inn or something?”

Elsa looks confused. “We do not have inns in Heimili.”

“So there’s no fantastical viking version of Motel 6? Not even a fantastical viking version of Airbnb?”

“I assume those are places in your world where people pay for a room. Here, a household may take a traveler in. An alehouse provides mead and ale, a bit of food if the brewer is generous. But in our land, you make your own way,” Elsa says.

“Southern kingdoms,” Anna mutters, rolling her eyes. “They cannot sleep without a pillow.”

“Well,” Emma says, and sets her things down, her heart dropping as she hears them thunk against the cold hard ground. “So much for me calling room service.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once Elsa has gone into her usual trance, signaling that she has entered total disengagement from the world until morning, Emma turns to Anna.

“Big day tomorrow, huh?”

Anna is already arranging the furs where she’ll sleep. “A red sun may rise.”

"Thought you were staying out of trouble, Carrots."

"I do not think honorable vengeance is trouble." Anna makes two fists, smirking. "I expect a fight. I will give what is expected of me."

“Huh. So this could be our last night alive. Kind of seems like a night for drinking.”

The redhead gives her companion a sly grin, now very used to this kind of banter between the two of them. “You need your rest, _vargdropi_. You will want all your strength if the jarl’s men turn their blades on you. You are no match for such a fight.”

“Bitch, please. I’m a valkyrie.”

“Yet you beg for mead like a dog."

“So you’re telling me there’s nowhere in this town where a girl can get a drink incognito?”

Anna shrugs, eyes twinkling. “There is an ale house. The mead is very fine and the brewer is a woman of good repute. Or at least she was in the time of my father.”

“You know I love a good ale house, Carrots.”

“We would have to be very quiet. _Very_...I do not know the word. Like a mouse in the dark."

“Literally me. I will be the quietest, most lowkey individual _ever_. Scout’s honor.”

“I do not know this Scout whose honor you often invoke, but I do not trust that he would accept your pledge.” She sighs, and then the familiar smirk appears. “Fine. One mead. But no more.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are knots and flowers carved into the door of the ale house, and Emma does not miss that Anna runs a quick hand over their shapes before opening it, her expression solemn. She knows that in Heimili, wood carvings' techniques and motifs vary from region to region. She assumes this flower is a shape Anna has not seen in a long time.

“Come on, Carrots.” She gives the shieldmaiden’s armored shoulder a squeeze. “I’ve got your back.”

A few heads turn when they enter, and then a few more. Emma’s gotten used to the hush that sometimes falls over establishments in Heimili when she happens to show up, particularly with a fully armored Anna as her entourage. This, of course, could be different. She wonders if they recognize the grown daughter of the former jarl. A whisper carries _valkyrja_ through the room, and she pretends she hasn’t noticed the way expressions are changing, heads pressing closer together. She nods to Anna, and they take a seat on the far end of the hall, closest to the fire.

“Bullshit,” Anna mutters, and Emma shoots her a look.

“What’s that about?”

“I was surprised.”

“Shit is for surprise. Bullshit is for calling bluffs.” Emma smirks. “We’ve been over this, Carrots.”

“Fine,” Anna says. “Shit. I say shit.” She motions with her elbow to the other side of the room, where a blond man is downing his ale and listening intently to someone’s story about falling into troll dung. Emma only needs to look at the sudden rise in color in her companion’s cheeks to know exactly what the heck is going on. She grins.

“You know him?”

“No,” Anna says, a little too quickly.

“You want to get to know him, though, right?” She waggles her eyebrows. “Lucky for you, I’m the ultimate wingwoman.”

“You are a liar.” Anna sinks further down onto the bench, hiding herself behind a tanker. “You have no wings.”

“I’m going to go over there and hype you up big time. He’s going to be in love before he finishes that drink.”

“Why would he listen to you?”

Emma winks. “Because I’m a valkyrie.”

Anna groans. “You are not even a good valkyrja.”

“Excuse you, Carrots. A hero of prophecy is about to sit down next to the dude and tell him that the redhead in the corner is god’s gift to farmhands. And even if he doesn’t believe I’m the legend herself, I’m very charming. Order us some drinks for when I get back. Tell the bartender to make me a Sex on the Beach. Shaken, not stirred. Oh, and some cocktail peanuts. Or maybe some loaded potato skins? Get an appetizer if you feel up to it.”

There was a time when Anna would’ve gaped at Emma, even raised her eyebrows in brief confusion, but now, all too used to this tired joke, she just rolls her eyes.

“So mead?”

Emma sighs. “Yes, of course, mead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The man’s name is Kristoff and as soon as she plants herself next to him, he jumps nearly an inch off the bench and spills his ale.

“You like carrots?”

He eyes her carefully. “Yes.”

“Fabulous. Name’s Swan Wheat, professional valkyrie. You may have heard of me, I’m kind of a big deal around here.”

He shrugs. “I am not in town often.”

She pauses at this. “Well, yeah, but there’s a legend about me. The prophecy? I made the kid that saves the world? I’m a valkyrie that...does what valkyries do? Any of this ringing a bell?”

Kristoff looks at her. “The jarl rings the bell for the feast days.”

Emma sighs. “You’re perfect for each other.” She points across the room. Anna waves rather sheepishly for a formidable shieldmaiden of considerable power. “See that redhead in the corner? She’s the real deal. I’m not even half the warrior she is. You definitely want to meet her, and that’s coming from me, a valkyrie, who knows what I’m talking about.”

“But I do not know who you are.”

“I’m a valkyrie. _The_ valkyrie, I guess, since I haven’t heard of any others.”

“Are you Brynhildr?”

“No.”

“Guðr?”

“No.”

“Svipul?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hrund?”

“Are you just making these up?”

“Are you Eir?”

“I’m Swan Wheat, or, uh...Svan...Svanhvít.”

He looks her over, adjusts the hair falling into his eyes, and then shrugs. “So you are.”

“Were those all valkyries you named?

“There are more.”

“You seem unimpressed.” She snaps her fingers, making bruni spring alive on her hand, and waves it around. “Is this not cool?” She attempts to throw the bruni from hand to hand, smiling awkwardly as she doesn’t quite achieve the act of juggling fire. Kristoff watches, sipping his ale calmly.

Across the room, Anna is staring in disbelief, mouth hanging open, clearly confused by this strategy.

Emma puts the fire out, and then takes a deep breath. “So what do you think of my friend over there?”

Kristoff does smile at this. “She is beautiful.”

“Right? Total stunner. And she can murder literally anything that might threaten your beautiful romance. Trust me, I have seen her cut through draugrs like they were tissue paper. She can outdrink me, outrun me, and she smells better than I do. The girl does not miss laugardagr if you know what I mean.”

“Are you her slave?”

If Emma had been sipping on that Sex on the Beach, she would have spit it out. “Sorry?

“You speak of her as though you are her _þræll._ ”

“I’m Swan Wheat the valkyrie. I am definitely not waiting on her freckled ass.”

“Then why do you come to this side of the table and tell me of her strength and virtues?”

“Because I am trying to get you both some tail, Kristoff.”

Kristoff pulls out a link of bones on a leather thong. “I have a reindeer tail. I have no use for another one. This already brings luck on my travels.”

Emma sighs. “Okay, so you are definitely soulmates.” Across the room, Anna is looking concerned, and Emma shoots her a thumbs up with an attempt at a reassuring smile. “Look, you probably call it courtship--

“Courtship?” Kristoff now sounds worried. “I have not negotiated marriage with her family. She is a shieldmaiden."

“Whoa, slow down, buddy. Let’s not get our breeches in a twist. No one is trying to put a ring on it, okay? Just two consenting adults, enjoying each other’s company in an adult way.”

He stares at her. She stares at him.

“You are strange,” he says.

“I’ll be right back.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back at their table, Anna is peering at the situation over her ale. She shoots Emma a look as soon as she sits down.

“What happened?”

“It turns out I am not familiar enough with the courtship rituals of your culture to be a decent wingwoman.”

Anna snorts. “I told you. You do not have wings.”

“He thinks you’re beautiful, though.”

Anna lights up, her freckles cheeks flushing again. “He said this?”

“Yep, but he says he can’t court you because he’s not negotiating marriage with your family, so. I don’t know how that’s gonna work. Apparently you guys need a sexual revolution around here.”

Anna’s expression dims at this, and she slides the ale down to Emma. “Drink,” she says, and then looks darkly into her own tankard.

"Ale? Thought we were getting mead. Have they got anything else?"

Anna gives her a long and exhausted look. "You already know there are only two options."

“So you’re not going to talk to him?”

“He is a farmhand. My sister and I are daughters of the jarl.”

Emma makes a face, elbowing Anna in the side. “Oh, so it’s kind of a sexy forbidden romance thing. We can work with that! That’s a whole trope.”

“I don’t think--”

Without warning, everything shifts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emma is suspended above the tables of the mead hall, every inch of her glowing bright white, gold dripping from her hands and feet, and while her mouth is open and trying to scream, no sound comes out. She can see Anna standing, her face panicked, reaching for her. She can see the other occupants of the ale house with their hands on their waists, others diving under the tables, others racing for the door.

She strains, tries to make a noise, tries to move, tries to do anything. The intensity of heat and cold in her body takes over. She feels something changing in the air around her, and then everything speeds back up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emma hits the floor with an uncomfortable thud. Her hands where they claw the bench to get to her feet are still glowing - golden threads of light are spilling out into the wood as if inlaid there, and the bench feels as if it’s warping in her grip.

“Emma!” Anna’s pulling her upright, and when Emma glances around, there are men in the armor of the local jarl stepping towards her, swords drawn.

“What happened?

“Your seiðr…”

One of the jarl’s men reaches for her, and Anna spins on him, yelling something in a dialect Emma hasn’t heard before. He swings his sword and--

 _Oh, shit._ Emma’s hand has gone up before she realizes what’s happening, and a stream of bright gold light is sending the man all the way across the room, through the wall of the ale house, and into a pile of dung on the other side of the courtyard.

The others look at the viking-shaped hole in the wood, then at Emma, and go one of two ways: the ones wearing the armor of the jarl advance on her, and the ones with better survival instincts go running in the opposite direction.

“I don’t know how I did that,” she’s yelling to Anna, who is desperately dragging her out the door, despite the fact her legs can hardly work and she feels nine times heavier than usual and some parts of her continue to simultaneously freeze and burn. “It’s way too powerful! I can’t control it!”

Anna stops yanking on her and looks her dead in the eye, the shieldmaiden’s expression suddenly very serious as she grips Emma’s shoulders. “You are Valkyrja. Valkyrja can fly.”

"What?"

Anna's voice lowers to a forceful whisper. "Wingwoman."

Emma’s chest is still throbbing. Her limbs feel like they are on fire. Every inch of her vibrates as if she’s just plugged herself into a thousand volts, and what does she think about?

Flying home.

Like that, they are thirty feet off the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And about a minute later, Emma unable to even scream in reaction, they are landing on the other side of the village, the light in her limbs sputtering out, leaving her on her back and Anna next to her.

“Holy shit.”

“Yes,” Anna breathes, eyes wide as saucers as she stares into the sky. “It is holy shit.”

“Elsa’s gonna know we’re gone, isn’t she?”

“Oh yes.”

“I just put a hole in the side of a building.”

“Yes.”

“I just flew.”

“Like a swan.”

“Did I kill that guy?”

“No. But he is...probably not well.”

“How did I do that?”

Anna finally turns to look at her, sitting up. “Your seiðr grew. Like I have never seen it before.”

Emma lets out the breath she’s been holding for what seems like ages. “Holy shit, I leveled up.”

“Something changed.”

“Did I do that?”

“I do not know. What were you thinking of this time?"

"Nothing...it was totally different than when I usually ignite it. Would I have been able to do that myself?"

"I do not think so. I wonder..." She peers at Emma carefully, as if something is written there. "Elsa will know for sure, but I believe it is more likely that someone...I do not know the word in your language. Opened the door, unfastened...unlocked whatever part of you held the seiðr back. There is such seiðr as that, if the bond exists.”

 _Oh._ Regina. She doesn’t know how, or why, but she just...knows.

“Come,” Anna says, pulling on Emma’s shoulder. “We cannot stay here. The jarl’s men will not take kindly to a Valkyrja here. You are an omen to them.”

“I thought they worshipped us! I’ve literally been telling everyone I’m a valkyrie.”

Anna gives her a pitying look. “No one would believe you, Emma.”

“Wait,” Emma says, but Anna is already hiking off in the direction of the forest. “What’s that supposed to mean? I have magic and I’m super buff and everything.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

But just before they reach the treeline, a number of disturbing things happen:

First, a dark cloud covers the moon on an otherwise cloudless night. It’s very ominous.

Then, the groan of too many undead sounds. It’s also very ominous.

Finally, a fire rises instantaneously from the direction of the ale house, and this is more than ominous - this is very much doomed right now.

Emma looks at Anna. “Uh, Carrots?”

Anna doesn’t need to say anything - the heroic instinct in both of them has flared at the same time, and there is no option but to do what they do best - to save, if that's the way of it. Before she can think of anything else, they are racing back in the direction they came from, and she is readying herself for the mentality of a fight, of whatever it's going to take. Emma attempts to push off the ground, wishing for divine intervention, wishing for real wings, wishing for pixie dush, anything to get her flying again, but it does not come. Instead they are rushing, her hand on the hilt of her sword, her shield slapping against her back, and whatever is about to happen, well. She may or may not be ready for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emma peers around the corner of the farmhouse where they are currently crouching, a safe - but not for long - distance from where the jarl’s men are clashing with a pack of draugrs. They had to cut down a few draugrs to even get to this side of the village, not to mention the jarl’s men they dodged who decided that even after seeing a woman literally send a man through a wall while levitating, this is the gal to pick a fight with tonight. Now, things have gotten swiftly out of hand, and Emma is very sure the two of them are not going to be a match for this kind of outnumbering, leveled up valkyrie powers or not. In a ring of flames, the grandpappy of all draugrs is floating menacingly, red hair catching the light of the fire as he swiftly strangles a man in midair.

“Wait, I recognize this bastard. He’s the one who showed up when my kid was here.”

“Hans,” Anna breathes, the torchlight highlighting the spray of blood across her forehead, and Emma gives her a look.

“You know this guy?”

“We were…” Anna’s mouth twists, seemingly unable to find the words. “Lovers.”

“You’re kidding.”

But Anna’s expression tells her that she is definitely not kidding. “I was young.”

“You can’t be serious.” The flying draugr-man beyond is easily one of the top ten most disgusting creatures Emma has seen. “ _That’s_ your type?”

The shieldmaiden groans, throwing up her hands. “He did not look like that!”

One of the jarl’s men goes flying through the air, half of him on fire. Emma blinks. “Was he this insanely evil back then?”

“No,” Anna says, but then corrects herself. “Yes, but I did not know it at the time.”

“You didn’t think to mention it before, maybe when he showed up the first time and tried to murder us?”

“I was…” Anna breathes in sharply. “Conflicted.”

Emma adjusts her grip on her sword, calculating the distance from here to the other building. “So is it going to be awkward if I kill him?”

Anna snorts. “You cannot kill him.”

“Wanna bet?”

“He is the son of a goddess. He cannot be slain by a mortal.”

“Your ex is immortal?” Emma raises her eyebrows. “I honestly can’t with you, Carrots. When we get out of this mess, we will dive right into your romantic history because I need to unpack all of it.”

“You cannot face him, Emma.”

“I’m a valkyrie. Besides, my kid was able to take his arm off.”

“Your daughter is a being of unimaginable power.”

“If I can’t kill him, can I at least ruin his day?”

Anna stares at Emma, seeming to simultaneously exercise her extreme frustration while considering the somewhat ridiculous proposal. She sighs. “Do not do that."

“I'll pretend I didn't hear that.” And she lights up both hands, sends bruni all the way up her sword, and spins around the other side of the wall.

This has her meeting a pack of draugrs head on, and that doesn’t go well for the draugrs. Anna has also leaned into the fight, though whatever reluctance she had initially displayed has been replaced by her usual bloodlust, and the shieldmaiden is on fire. Literally. Emma cast bruni onto her shield and sword and the girl is one terrifying vision of flaming death. Those draugrs did not see it coming.

Emma keeps trying to make her way to Hans - and calling this nasty hell beast Hans would make her chuckle under any other circumstance, chiefly those circumstances where she is not fighting for her life - but the combination of draugrs and jarl’s men are a decent obstacle. Her new attempts to fly are...not working very well. Whatever burst had allowed them to lift off outside the ale house is now long gone, and she’s not sure if it’s exhaustion or a lack of inspiration or whatever insanely powerful force had given her that sudden increase in XP taking a rest. She lifts a foot off the ground, toe dragging as she dodges a swinging blade, and then knocks another draugr with her shield, nearly tripping as she’s dragged back to earth.

Some idiot on a reindeer is currently trying to take on a few draugrs himself and--

“Kristoff?” Emma kicks a man out of the way to get to the rider, and the familiar blond gapes at her before swinging over her head, slicing through one of the jarl’s men that was about to stab her in the back. “This isn’t your fight, dude! You’re going to get yourself killed!”

He ignores her, sees Anna in the crowd, and kicks the reindeer’s hindquarters, springing through the mess. Emma groans, but her frustration with young love is swiftly replaced by her frustration with the undead.

“Hans,” she yells. The uber-draugr ignores her. She grimaces in irritation, ducking to avoid a swinging sword, and tries to get closer.

“Hey, Hans!” Hans swings around in midair, eyes falling on her, and she sees both his hands sparking with unnatural fire. Great. “Okay,” she says, already feeling the seiðr moving through her, the memory of warmth and smiles and the thought of things to come slowing time, pulling the energy in the air towards her, into her. “Let’s dance, you ugly bastard.”

Hans, the nasty son of a bitch, actually smiles at her. Rotten gums and all! In any other situation, she’d probably have felt her stomach drop to her feet, but the magic’s in her hands, and this is her show now.

Until a reindeer smacks into her side and someone yanks her by the scruff of her neck onto its back, pulling her away from the grinning draugr and into the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Are you kidding me right now?” This in the moment they are deep in the forest and have tumbled to the ground, the reindeer and its rider coming to a jolting stop, Anna hopping off, Emma forcefully shoving her off. “I totally had him. What the hell were you doing?”

“You would have died,” Anna says, keeping her from swinging with that superhuman shieldmaiden strength of hers. “I told you that no mortal can slay him.”

“And you!” She spins in Anna’s grip, pointing accusingly at Kristoff. “I did not ask for deus ex reindeer over here, okay? You robbed me of my kill.”

Kristoff looks at Anna. Anna shakes her head.

“Oh, now you guys are communicating with just a glance?” Emma groans, pulling her shield onto her back. “Perfect. Enjoy each other, mazel tov. I’m going to go save all those people.”

Anna yanks her backwards. “Emma,” she says, the firmness of her voice threatening in other contexts. “You will die. You are not meant to win that fight.”

“So we’re supposed to leave that village to a demonspawn and his minions? Really?”

“There are two of us. Even with Elsa, we will perish.”

“So what? You’re always talking about Valhalla-this and Valhalla-that. Why are you suddenly so sheepish about certain death, Carrots?”

Anna takes a deep breath. She releases her grip on Emma, stepping back. Emma can see her stumble, and a stain of blood along her side. “We must choose our battles. Even you.”

Emma stares at her. She feels hot and angry and none of it has anything to do with magic, all of it is emotions and exhaustion and that familiar sting of spilling blood, your own and someone else’s. She realizes she is panting. She wants to fall to her knees in this moment, but she stays upright, sees the look on the shieldmaiden’s face, and it makes something inside of her snap.

“Did he show up because of my powers? Like last time, when everyone was time traveling at the hut, he showed up because he felt that, too, didn’t he?”

Anna nods. “Yes, I think so. He is drawn to the seiðr, Elsa will know for sure--”

“So this is my fault, but I can’t do anything about it.”

“Emma....”

She sees it. She sees the way she looks at her, and she knows.

“The stories don’t say I kill him, do they?”

Anna shakes her head.

“He just keeps murdering people until my daughter shows up again, doesn’t he? That’s what the prophecy says?”

Anna nods, and then says nothing else.

Emma finally does fall to her knees, and it’s damp there, a thin layer of snow soaking her calves. As she hits the ground, a speartip is being shoved into her face, followed by a number of drawn arrows. The jarl's men emerge from the darkness of the woods, surrounding the three of them.

"Fabulous," Emma groans, making a show of dropping her weapons. "Really, this is totally fabulous."

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: the viking society stuff is true re: vulva life, hospitality, food, etc. the more you know!


	11. ii. أم

 

 

 

 

 

It is early evening - not quite time for the final meal of the day, not quite time for the lights to be lit along the spire, but late enough for her to be exhausted - when she decides to rest.

Regina allows herself the nap even if they have always felt like an indulgence - as a royal, the concept was a foreign, even foolish one. Close your eyes without a guard and you were begging for a knife in your side, or so said her mother time and time again. That was how she had been raised to think of her position: enemies were inevitable, death was always a possibility, fear was the way forward. She tries not to think about such things anymore, not when she can pretend they are someone else’s memories.

The last time she had slept in, genuinely stayed in bed longer than she ever let herself, had been with Emma’s arms around her.

She sighs as she falls back into her pillows, staring at the stone ceiling, its surface a dusky orange in the last light of the day that has made its way in from the balcony. Why does that morning seem like years ago? A lifetime ago, if she’s honest. But it has only been four months, and while the once seemingly constant sickness has gone away - there’s nothing quite like vomiting up something both biological and magical while trying to hide it from a teenager who has a tendency to pop in and out of the apartment without notice - she’s still constantly exhausted. Most of it surely has to do with what will soon be stirring inside her, but some of it...some of it is from everything else.

Tomorrow they leave for Heimili. Tomorrow they begin the journey to Emma. _Home_ , she thinks, flattening her palm over the place where magic has done something miraculous.

So, she has earned this nap. All of their belongings are currently sitting packed beside the door, ready to be loaded into the saddles that are strapped to sand snakes, and then re-strapped to a camel at the border of the dunes. Regina has mapped the route out on paper, but in her mind, she’s visited it a hundred times even in just the last day, making sure nothing is out of place. They will be on their own once they leave the dunes, and then…

And then so long as they can find a portal, Emma could be less than a day away.

It didn’t take long to pack their things - they had arrived with the clothes off their back and not much else, after all, the few magical items she’d been handed in Storybrooke before being shoved unceremoniously through the portal lost in transit, her winter jacket long since discarded during their first trek across the sands. What they’ve acquired while living here has been from Regina trading in the market for limited resources - supplies for healing, a few things she thought she’d try to appease her magic - and will make for light carry.

Henry had dragged his feet before having to pack anything, reluctantly throwing things into a bag only when Regina reminded him for the third time. She imagines them making similar bargains if they were back in their house in their old world - she has to remind herself that this tension between them is not unusual for a teenager and his mother. But she knows what it is run through with, and she knows that their journey tomorrow is part of the reason for it.

Before she lets herself sleep, she calls out to him in his room. “Henry?”

“Yeah?” comes the reply, breaking a little with the new tone in his voice.

“We’ll eat when the sun’s down, is that okay?”

She hears the sound of bare feet hitting warm stone, and then the shuffle as he comes to her doorway, pulling back the curtain to look at her. She has no idea what this emotion is that has draped itself around his features - it almost frightens her, the strangeness of it, but then he’s wrapping her in a hug, his face in her hair.

“I love you, Mom,” he says, and she feels herself tearing up when she pulls him towards her. It’s careless, in a way - she’s been careful to conceal even the slightest changes to her body, careful to hug him from certain angles, keep him at a distance she half-resents. But she presses him as close as she can, close enough to get the smell of him, still the same under the layer of desert and warm spire air and the things she’s come to associate with this place: heat, spice, the dry desert flowers that are crushed over heads for protection.

“I love you, too,” she says, kissing his forehead. “I love you so much.” When he pulls away, she cups his cheek, smiling. “I want to take a nap, is that alright? Wake me up if I’m not up in an hour.”

“Okay,” he says, nodding. He looks at her before letting the curtain drop behind him, and the way he glances at her over his shoulder is so like his mother that it makes her heart ache twice as hard. “Sweet dreams,” he says, smiling.

It’s relief she feels when the curtain drops. She thought he’d look at her with that disappointment forever. After everything that had happened, she had worried about the worst.

  
  
  


 

 

This is how it had gone:

Jafar had told her the truth of the matter. She'd nearly collapsed, unable to process any of it. Only when she stood at the mouth of the cavern, awaiting the sand snake to take her home, the moon smirking down at her, did she let herself feel all of it at once. A hand to her middle, she'd leaned against the cool stone, pressed her face there, laughed while she cried.

She'd remembered the bitter taste of the potion in her throat. She'd remembered the weeks of pain, stumbling from her bed to the privy, the blood that wouldn't stop until her tears had matched it. Once, only once, did she send a scout to the shore of Lake Nostos. What he brought back for her - a vial of water, wrapped in soft deerhide - she had hidden away for years. Before they came to Storybrooke, she'd crushed it under her heel, one of many dreams that needed to die to midwife the other world into being. Of course, she hadn't known it was already there, waiting, that she was not necessary in anything but the tiny corner of Maine she'd remade for them. 

What was it they said about true love? She'd never listened. She hadn't wanted to, not even when Emma Swan arrived in her town like a thunderhead descending. Not even when Regina had fallen into her own bed with her arms around Emma's neck, when she'd accepted Emma's kisses like they could heal something, when she'd finally let Emma enter her. Regina knew about the oldest magic, but she'd refused its presence in her life, and she'd never thought she'd be its apprentice, much less its vessel.

Yes, Regina Mills had thought, staring out at the moonlit desert, knowing exactly where she was, who she was, what it was she carried. It was time. 

After leaving the jinn’s cave, she’d returned to the spire with a singular determination - she was taking Henry and leaving for Heimili as soon as possible. She did not care what she’d been told in some dream juncture, and she did not care that they had little to use to bargain their way north. She was not giving birth in a hole in a desert outcropping while Emma waited in the snow.

The first place she’d gone when she’d returned to the spire was to Yasmin’s keep.

“Cousin?” Yasmin had spoken to her only sparingly since the incident with the prisoner. Regina had known from the old days how to navigate this kind of tension, but she sensed a reluctance in the younger woman to keep up the coolness between them. Yasmin was raised the daughter of a caliph, and now fixed herself as a hardened desert revolutionary, but she was still young, and she had believed in Regina. She had kept her cousin and her son housed because she believed that they were the ones mentioned in the prophecy who would return Cordova to its rightful state. Whatever trouble Regina brought to Yasmin, it was clear the young woman was determined to put up with it regardless, because these were the people who would help save her beloved home. 

Regina found herself unprepared to break the girl’s heart. But, this was what had to be done.

“How far to the nearest port?”

Yasmin paused before responding, making no effort to hide that she was studying Regina carefully, always trying to keep a step ahead but finally unable to measure the path. “It’s a week’s journey to the edge of the dunes from here. Another two days to the sea on camels, three if the weather turns. Why?”

“I need to go to Heimili.”

“Heimili?” Yasmin was suddenly pale. “Cousin, that is a considerable distance.”

“I’m sorry. We can’t thank you enough for everything you have done for us, but we can’t stay any longer. Henry and I will need passage north. I can manage it myself so long as I know the way.”

Again, Yasmin said nothing for a moment. “Why Heimili?”

“Emma is there.”

Yasmin had only heard Emma mentioned a few times - Regina had been cautious in sharing her personal history with anyone in this world, not because of their judgment, but because of what such information could mean towards endangering Emma or herself. The young woman knew more of Emma from Henry’s stories than from anything Regina had ever said to her. “I see.” She looked at Regina as though she was expecting her to say something else - to explain, to change her mind, to do something Regina was not willing to do. Finally, she nodded, and went back to reading documents. “You are not our prisoners,” she said, her eyes on the parchments in her hand. “You can leave when you wish. I’ll make arrangements for someone to take you to the edge of the dunes.”

Regina took a deep breath, willing the younger woman to turn and make eye contact with her again, knowing she wouldn’t. “Thank you, Yasmin.”

“Of course, cousin.” Yasmin gestured with her hand towards the ceiling, towards the rest of the spire where it grew into the sky. “Go in peace.”

  
  
  
  


 

“Heimili?” Henry was sitting on the edge of the balcony in the same clothing as the desert nomads who frequented the spire, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed like his mother’s. He’d recently shaved his head in the style of the other boys here, and there was the unmistakable shade of a first mustache above his lip, as obvious as the extra inch he’d grown since they arrived. It made her chest ache, but it was twisted up in the way he was looking at her, confusion mixed with accusation. “Isn’t that really far up north?”

“Yes. Without a portal, it would take a month to get there. But, if we go up the coast, we can get to a city in Gallica and find a portal, and then--”

“But we haven’t finished what we came here for.”

She could feel her tone hardening, preparing for a debate. He was too like his mother when he got this way, and she knew it. “What we came here for was to find Emma.”

He frowned at this, but still shrugged. “And how is this helping?”

“Emma is in Heimili.”

Henry froze. “She is?”

“Yes,” Regina knew she was smiling, but in the moment, it was impossible to help. “I don’t know exactly where, but we can find her when we get there. It shouldn’t be too hard to track her down, knowing your mother. Every jarl has probably crossed her by now. I wouldn't be surprised if she's herding trolls or something else ridiculous--”

“How do you know she’s there?”

“Ah,” she paused. “A few months ago, I met a future version of her in a juncture.”

Henry stared at her. “A what?”

“Sort of like a self-contained portal, or a room between two worlds. It’s...I’m not sure how to explain it, but it doesn’t matter. Since she comes from the future and knows the past, she told me that our Emma is in Heimili.”

He made a face, though he knew better that such things are never as implausible as they seemed. “A future version of Ma told you that current Ma is in Heimili.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Wait, this was months ago?”

“Yes, but--”

“So you’ve known all this time. You’ve known where Ma was and you didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t want to worry you until there was something to be done about it.”

“But you wouldn’t even tell me?”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“I’m old enough to decide if I…” he started, but his voice trailed off, and he looked away from her, scuffing his foot against the ground. “Whatever. Okay, so you want to go see Ma. And then what? Bring her back here?”

“No. We wouldn't be returning.” She saw his expression change, and quickly added: “We’re leaving as soon as we can arrange for travel. Are you ready to go?”

“But we haven’t done anything about Cordova.”

She sighed in frustration, knowing the conversation was always heading there but hoping like a fool that they could somehow avoid it. “What were we supposed to do, Henry?”

“There’s a prophecy--”

“There are prophecies about everything, Henry. That’s what it’s like in this world. You can’t throw a stone here without hitting someone whose birth was foretold by an omen or a soothsayer or a talking pig. There is a prophecy about who’s going to tie their shoelaces three hundred years from now, that’s how ridiculously many there are. They are always up for interpretation and they should not govern everything we do, do you understand?”

“We were sent here for a reason.”

“We were sent here because the portal was assembled by idiots.”

“You’ve always said magic has a mind of its own!”

“But we have minds, too, Henry. We are not slaves to the whims of something that’s not real.”

“You literally _practice_ magic. You know it’s real.”

“I only meant that it--”

“It doesn’t matter.” Henry pushed away from the balcony, heading back inside. “If you knew all this time that Ma was in Heimili but you didn’t go before, then you knew we were here for a reason. You knew there was something for us to do here. Otherwise you would have left right away.”

She followed him, reaching for his arm. “It was more complicated than that.”

He turned, his eyes shining. “So why now? Why do we have to just pack up and go all of a sudden?”

She looked at him. This was the moment. This was the best chance she had to tell him the truth.

Because your mother and I did something impossible, and I do not want to go through it without her. Because I’m not waiting here any longer for magic to interfere with my life at its whim. Because I’m pregnant, Henry, and this was never supposed to happen, and I made a deliberate choice a long time ago to make sure I would never be in this position, but I am, and I still can’t quite believe it, and I’m happy, and I’m scared, and I love her as much as I love you, so impossibly much, and I can’t be without either of you. Because if I have to do it alone, I will, but if I can have her be here with me, wherever that is, I’ll cross the whole continent.

But Henry was looking at her and it was not the anger of a teenager who doesn’t understand, and it was not confusion, it was not disappointment in his eyes. It was concern. It was the worry she saw in him when he came home from the parapet during a sandstorm - not worried because he could have gotten hurt, but worried because of what the loss of him it would do to her. It was the worry she sees when he gets up early to kiss her before he goes out for the day, or stands up for his mother to Yasmin even when Regina knows he wants to impress her, or cups her hands when they bleed too much magic, making sure no one sees, or making sure she’s not too weak to get back inside.

She saw everything he has had to deal with in his young life, more than anyone should have to, and she remembered every burden of knowledge and concern her mother ever dropped into her lap without another thought. She remembered the way fear ran through her life. She remembered the way it had covered her heart in the worst way.

So she looked at her son and answered him the only way she knew how:

“Because it’s time.”

He didn’t believe her. She could tell by his frown, and the way he shrugged after a long while, after staring her down as if he was expecting her to say something else, just like Yasmin had. Disappointment, perhaps. Betrayal, at the worst.

“Fine,” he’d said, and drawn the curtain across the divide of his room.

And that is how it had gone.

  
  
  
  


 

So now, with the unexpected blessing of her son’s hug, with the change in his demeanor, she allows herself to finally, blissfully sleep.

Almost immediately, she is awake again. She finds herself in the study from months before, the juncture her future self constructed. Emma in her armor and her scars and her half-shaved braided hair is leaning against the doorframe again, looking up in surprise when Regina arrives.

“Regina?”

“You’re back,” she says, and then starts when Future Emma trips forward, her hand catching on a beam and knocking a few books onto the floor. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, steadying herself, but Regina knows that Future Emma is still Her Emma, and neither are good at hiding their pain. “I’m in top form.

“Why are we here?” Regina takes a closer look at her surroundings. She can’t remember the details from the last time, but she’s pretty sure not much has changed. Same piles of books and containers of spell ingredients, same familiar smell. “It’s been months since the first time I came here.

“Months, huh?” Emma looks her up and down, making her way to the chair in the corner nearest Regina. “I saw you a few hours ago in my time. I just activated it on my end again. Didn’t realize it would pull you back in, too. You asleep now or something?”

Regina nods. “Napping.”

“Must be fate.” Future Emma collapses into the chair beside her, untying part of her armor to reveal a shallow but concerningly long gash on her side.

Regina’s breath catches. “What happened?”

“Well, that’s kind of why I’m here. Thought I might take a breather in a place like this and slap on some magic before finishing up these errands. Sorry you ended up here, too. Must be the way you set up the juncture - if someone enters on my end, it opens yours, too.”

Regina drops to her knees, pulling the armor out of the way and tentatively touching Future Emma’s skin near the wound. “It’s not too bad. I could heal it if you have time.”

“How long do you plan on napping?”

Regina smirks. “Stay still,” she says, fingers sparking as they press to the closest edge of the gash. “Let me help you.”

“Hell of a day,” Emma says, frowning down at the wound. “You are going to murder me when I get back.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m on very specific instructions. There was not meant to be any deviation from those instructions, right? Typical instructions from you. Needless to say, I, uh...deviated.”

Regina raises an eyebrow. “Deviated?”

“Yeah, there may or may not have been some...improvisation.”

“Is that how this happened?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Good fodder for an ‘I told you so’ once I’m home.”

Regina tuts. “I wouldn’t tell you ‘I told you so.’ Not if you came home looking like this.”

A warm smile from Future Emma. “Yeah, I know,” she says, cheeks turning pink. “You’re going to fuss over me for hours. You’ll appreciate your own handiwork, though.”

“What happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It will take me some time to heal this, or at least heal it enough for you to continue on.”

“Well, the short of it is that I still have an axe to grind with an old nemesis and the fucker happened to come across my path, so, you know. Kinda had to take my shot while I had it.”

Regina almost laughs at that, the Emma-ness of it all. “And did that work?”

“Oh, no. He’s half-immortal. Can only be slain by one person, and I am not that person. I already knew that, failed at the task a good number of times back in the day, but couldn’t help myself when I saw that ugly undead mug after all these years. Had to get a few swings in, you know?” She smirks to herself, a familiar expression. “Worth it, honestly. Just to see him off his game for a bit.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“Probably not. Why change what’s already perfect?” She bluffs, pulling a face, then winces a little as Regina’s magic pushes on the wound’s edges. “Kidding, kidding. I’m predictable, that’s all.” She breathes out when the pressure ceases for a moment, and Regina can see the sweat on her forehead. “How about you? Are you okay?”

Regina chances a look at her, pausing in her healing. She smiles a little, seeing the familiar expression on this version of Emma, that honesty and genuine care that has always made her chest ache so sweetly. “I’m pregnant,” she says quietly, and Future Emma breaks into a grin, chuckling.

“So you know now.” She’s still grinning. “Good.”

“Did you know? When we first met?”

“We first met on your front step, if you recall.”

“Sorry,” Regina says, blushing. “I forget that you’re the same person. Not that you don’t look like yourself, it’s just...if you’re here, it’s hard for me to accept that you’re also in my waking life, too, but somewhere else. It’s all a little complicated.”

“Oh, it’s a hot mess, no doubt.” She smirks. “I knew what you meant, though. Yes, I knew when you first found the juncture. Pretty hard to forget when I have the kid back home. A teenager, actually, and fully embracing her rebellious stage. Once she turned sixteen, she decided she was going to be my brand of headstrong idiot mixed with your brand of determined intensity. Oh, and she’s a magical prodigy of historic proportions, so try grounding her. It’s a real party.” The smirk softens. “Nah, she’s the best.” She laughs again.

Her voice must be cracking with emotion now. “She?”

“Yeah,” Future Emma says, leaning forward and kissing Regina’s hair. “She.” She chuckles. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, the whole rule about not telling you about the future and all, but you know, I don’t care.”

Regina’s mouth is dry, her whole body thrumming with energy. “Does my Emma know?”

“Yes.”

Regina finds herself breathless at this knowledge. “How?”

“Prophecies are a wild thing.”

Regina can’t help but roll her eyes. “Of course there’s a prophecy.”

“I know. You can’t just give birth to some normal average kid. It’s got to be a child of legend who’s going to save the world, the whole nine yards. Henry’s at least had a chance to adjust to coming up in one story or another. This kid was _born_ into it. Stuck with it from the get-go.” She sighs. “Have you told Henry yet?”

“No. I didn’t know when would be the right time. There’s been a lot for us to deal with and I just...I’m waiting for the moment when he’s ready. He worries too much as it is.”

“Right,” Emma says, nodding thoughtfully. “Getting a bit crazy down there, if I recall.”

“It’s been...difficult.”

“Sofia’s inquisition,” Emma says, making a face. “She’s a real piece of work.”

“Well, she won’t be my problem much longer. I’m taking Henry to Heimili. We leave tomorrow.”

Something flashes across Emma’s face, and she frowns momentarily, thinking. “Really?”

“Yes,” Regina says, pausing. “Why? Does something bad happen?”

“No, no,” Emma says, shaking her head too quickly. “It’s not like that. It’s just...well, it honestly doesn’t matter. I can’t say anything anyway.”

“You can’t tell me what happens next?”

“I mean, I could but it doesn’t make a difference.”

“Of course it does. What if I do the wrong thing?”

“There’s no wrong thing. It’s all going to happen the way it’s supposed to happen.”

Regina frowns. “So it’s all linear, then. There’s no diversion.”

“Time travel’s like taxes. No matter what, you still have to do it. Even if you know what happens, you still have to make it happen, and you will. It just works out like that. You once told me that you saw me more than once in the juncture. I'm pretty sure you gave me the rules because you knew I would break them.”

“Why does the juncture exist?”

“Huh.” Future Emma thinks for a minute. “Well, I’ll put it to you this way. For the kid, all this hopping between worlds is a bit like slipping through a curtain. Her curtain is our wall. So we have to build a door. This is the door.”

“But why did you need to see that I could access it? Am I going to the future at some point?”

“No,” Future Emma says. “Unless it’s in the future beyond me. Jeez, that’d be overly complicated, wouldn’t it?”

“This is already quite complicated.”

“Well, the juncture’s here for your safety. You might need it down the line.”

“I might need it or I _will_ need it?”

“Look, you with a streak of silver hair took me by the arm this morning and firmly reminded me that I am under no circumstances to talk future with you or any other past soul I encounter, and I’m sticking to that rule. Especially considering breaking another rule gave me this lovely little situation.” She gestures to the wound, half-healed now under Regina’s hand. “Not that you’re not doing a wonderful job clearing it up.”

“Fine,” Regina says, though she’s very dissatisfied with the answer. She pauses in her healing, staring up at the other woman - the scars, the white stripes in her braids, but still very much Emma, still the Emma she can’t believe she’s gone this long without seeing - and sighs. “I really miss you.”

“Oh, you have no idea the kind of pining I was doing in Heimili. Expert level pining.” Future Emma smirks at the memory, then looks at Regina. “You should tell Henry.”

“About the baby?”

“Yeah, he’s thirteen. Starting to get very teenage-y. He’ll be madder when he finds out the longer you keep it from him.”

“I’m protecting--”

“Oh, I know. You’re protecting him. Trust me, I get it. But I’m also raising a teenager right now and I can tell you from firsthand experience, they think they’re old enough to understand everything, and they’re resentful when they find out you withhold things.” She laughs. “Technically, my kids are older than yours.”

Regina can hardly comprehend it. “I wish you could tell me more.”

“Me too, there’s so many good things to tell. But,” and Future Emma leans forward just as Regina has finished on her wound, and she kisses her on the mouth. When she pulls away, she’s smirking. “You get to live it. And that’s even better.”

Regina stands, and Future Emma's hands wrap around her waist, her mouth suddenly pressed to her belly. "Sorry," Emma says into the front of her tunic, her tone warm. "It's just she hasn't been this little in so long." And she kisses her there. Regina starts, feeling the sudden stirring, the first ever, and she must make a noise in surprise because Future Emma's chuckling into her front. "I knew she'd recognize me," she says. "Hey kid."

When Regina blinks, she is opening her eyes in her room again. The room is dark - she must have slept much longer than an hour. She is back in the desert. Under her hand, the magic is pulsing, and that magic belongs to a girl, hers, _theirs_.

Emma’s kiss is still on her lips. Still in the place under her palm. Still there.

She sits up, smiling as she crosses the communal room, barely noticing that hours must have passed, and outside on the balcony moonlight is pouring through like milk on the deep orange sand.

“Henry, I want to--

His room is empty. The bed is cleared.

She looks to the door. His bag is still there beside hers, but when she goes through it, some of his clothing is missing.

She stands, paces. Tries to comprehend all this. Calls out the balcony for him, looks at the footholds up and down the spire for a familiar figure, climbs to the perch at the top of the spire to find nothing, only an empty platform and the long train of red flags that snap in the night wind.

  
  
  
  


 

“Henry’s gone.”

Yasmin looks up at her, a few other heads in her group turning from the plans on the keeps’ table at the sudden arrival of the outsider. There’s something strange about her expression: she doesn’t look alarmed, surprised, any of the usual emotions the young woman typically sports when Regina interrupts her work. Instead, she is calm, her brow only slightly furrowed, her mouth drawn.

“Interesting.”

Regina catches herself, thrown by the answer. “Interesting?”

“Eight youths are also missing from their homes as of sundown. If I’m not mistaken, they are the same company that Henry keeps.”

Her mind is racing at this new information, trying to take in all the possibilities at once. They have to act now. They have to do something. They have to understand what happened, what her son did because he is just like his mother, too brave, too determined, too secretive when he knows Regina won’t quite approve. “If someone took them, we can--”

“I don’t think anyone laid a hand on them. In fact, I’m sure of it.” Yasmin gets a look on her face, lost in brief concentration, and then taps the wrist of a man across the table. “Hani, did you not come across an abandoned den that had been reinhabited?”

The man nods earnestly. “It is unusal for a sand snake - it is not their way as creatures. They do not return to a den once they have outgrown it. That is why I reported it - it implies something out of the ordinary.”

“Could you take us there now?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Not far from the spire, Regina, Yasmin, and a group of Yasmin’s most trusted colleagues are deep in the base of a sand snake’s den, searching the abandoned containers once used by its owner, running their hands over notches in tunnels, walls, trying to find something strange. Regina can still feel her heart beating in every inch of her, but she’s willing herself to stay calm. Part of that is because this type of tension tends to cause her daughter to make even more magic, and she’s not sure that would help the situation at all.

She keeps wondering why Henry would have anything to do with a sand snake den like this, dusty, its floor covered in uncleared sand. He has never been the type to keep secrets of this magnitude from her. Silly plans, yes, but nothing this organized, certainly nothing that he knew would terrify her. That he would suddenly disappear, and that it would have something to do with a dingy hole on the outskirts of the village--

“There’s something here,” one of the women under Yasmin’s command says, tapping on a wall. She’s scraping away sand, her palm flat to the surface. “I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it humming.”

“You are sensitive to sihr?” Regina asks, crossing the den, but that becomes apparent when she sees what the woman has found.

“What is it?” Yasmin is at her shoulder, head cocked.

“It’s a concealment spell. Quite simple, actually.” Regina squints in wonder, running a finger over the surface and watching it shimmer in response. “But Henry can’t do this kind of magic.”

Yasmin looks closer, though Regina knows it will be hard for her to see anything significant there. “Does he know how it would be done in theory?"

“Well, yes, if he read about it.”

“There is a girl among his friends. She is considered more gifted than most in sihr. She may have been the one to do it.”

And as Regina goes about the work of dismantling the spell, it becomes more clear that it was a novice who put it together, as it takes almost no effort to reverse it. The illusion of the wall falls away, and Yasmin breathes in sharply as the shelves carved into the wall appear in plain sight.

There are a few books in the compartment, most on the history of Cordova, one a slim tome that was written in praise of Sofia and her reign. There are a few notes along the pages, underlined passages and circled phrases.

It’s becoming clearer, and Regina’s stomach has dropped out at the realization, at just what it is her son has been doing in this den when he is out of her sight, but then one of the men has cleared away the sand from the floor, and everyone is drawing back in surprise at what has been carved there.

“A map,” someone says. Regina spins, the book on Sofia still in her hands, now pressed to her front. She looks down, and indeed someone has carved a massive map into the floor of the den, with some things scribbled along its surface, circles and lines and routes drawn in charcoal.

“Cordova,” Regina breathes, recognizing it. “They made a map of the city.”

Yasmin frowns down at it, hands on her hips. “This map will not have been of much use to them.”

Regina knows her memory of the city is not strong enough to have detected any errors. “How so?”

She shrugs, folding her arms. “It is not accurate.”

“It was at one time.” One of her men steps forward. “The layout of the city here is an ancient one. I have seen it on maps that are hundreds of years old.” He points. “See? This burial ground here? This is now a slum, and these streets do not exist in today’s city. There are many things here that do not exist anymore.” He crouches and taps at the hand drawn charcoal circle around a particular cluster of buildings, and a word that Regina knows is undoubtedly in Henry’s handwriting. “Someone has written ‘door’ here, but I can tell you that is no longer the case. This part of the palace was destroyed at least five generations before the reign of Sulitan.”

“It’s the gardens,” Regina says, recognizing where the young man’s finger has fallen beside the familiar shapes of the palace’s extensions, and she laughs in spite of herself. “He’s found a way into the palace.”

“Yasmin,” the young woman who earlier found the shelf has now pulled something from a different container. She holds it up. “It is the mark of Ali.”

A leather scrap embroidered with the form of a monkey. Yasmin groans, taking it from the woman’s hands. “This idiot,” she sneers, crumpling the leather in her hands.

Regina tries to look at it, but Yasmin has furiously balled it in her fist. Regina holds out a hand. “What is it?”

Yasmin drops the leather scrap unceremoniously into her palm. “Ali. An idiot.”

Hani shakes his head, addressing Regina. “He is a revolutionary, working in secret within the city walls to overthrow the inquisition. They say he is a beggar who rallied the others to his cause.”

Yasmin snorts. “He is not a revolutionary. His uprisings consist of petty theft and mild irritation to Sofia’s forces. He is little more than a common criminal who thinks he is a folk hero.”

Hani will not disagree with Yasmin outright, but there is an obvious look of tension when he meets her eye. “There are many who believe he will succeed.”

“Of course they do. He is a professional liar.”

Regina raises an eyebrow. “You’ve met this man before?”

“Boy,” Yasmin corrects. “And no, but his exploits have gotten in the way of our efforts before. What we organize amongst our connection still in Cordova, he has a tendency to unintentionally thwart with his foolishness. This is how he is well-known to us: by his own meddlesome conduct.”

“So if Henry and the others are with him, they may not be safe.”

“Oh, he’s not going to endanger them on purpose. He is very loyal to the cause of overthrowing Sofia, and our aims are technically the same. I am not surprised he’s involved in something like this. But I would not trust him to lead a scheme this complicated, and certainly not one infiltrating the palace. His techniques are better suited to stealing supplies and annoying the market guards.” She nods at Regina, stepping closer. “Cousin, I will retrieve him. I will send men--”

“I’m going.”

Yasmin shakes her head. “No, that will make things too difficult. Let me send my best to extract Henry and the others, and we can avoid any possibility of trouble.”

“You can send your best. I will go with them.”

“Absolutely not. You’d risk the entire mission.”

“He is my son.”

Yasmin studies her, and even in the dim light of the den it’s clear she’s come to an understanding. “Fine,” she says, nodding as she did that day in the keep, the prisoner bleeding behind her. But this time, her hand falls on Regina’s wrist, and she circles it. “I will go with you.”

  
  
  
  


 

It is an hour’s ride on the sand snakes to the city. All the while, Regina cannot keep her eyes off the walls of Cordova, glowing as they grow in the distance. She thinks of her son, her son who has suddenly decided to play the part of his idiot hero mother, and she loves both of them, she aches with love for both of their idiot hero hearts, but oh, she can’t imagine how much worse it can get. She can protect Henry, though it takes all her effort. She can just barely protect Emma, and only when she behaves. If Henry decides to take after his other mother, she’s not sure how she will manage.

In front of her, Yasmin shivers in her saddle. Regina, pressed close in the same harness, cannot miss the gesture.

“Cordova,” the younger woman says as the city’s lights become individually discernible, as it begins to loom rather than suggest itself. Regina is struck for only a moment by the old memories of the city, but she forces herself not to dwell. This is not how she wanted to introduce him to Cordova. This is not how she wanted to return at all, but that want is like so many others in her life - now impossible, something to quickly forget and throw away. Yasmin’s face is twisted into what Regina imagines is a similar emotion.

“Is this your first time back since--"

“Yes,” Yasmin says quickly, and the twist of her wrist causes the sand snake to fly lower over the dune, pulling them along the natural lines of the sand. “I have not seen the palace since the day they dragged us from it.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“No,” Yasmin says. “When my spy made contact with Ali, he said he would help us enter through the slums. It is the lower part of the city.” Her frame shakes with a long sigh. “It is better this way. I do not want to see the places I recognize.”

  
  
  
  


 

The sand snakes burrow close to the wall, out of sight, and their riders debark, moving wordlessly across the sand to what is clearly the entrance to the sewers. A small figure has appeared from between the bars, smirking at them. A young boy, no more than 11 or 12.

“You are the princess,” he says, looking at Yasmin.

“No,” she says, quickly denying any such connection to her identity, but nearly negating it by adding: “There are no princesses in the caliphate.”

The boy shrugs amiably. “There is no caliphate, either. Not anymore.” He gestures to an opening in the bars. “Come. This is the way to Ali.” As they step forward, he holds up a hand. "The mark of Abu," he says, wiggling his fingers expectantly, and Yasmin groans, pulling the leather scrap from her robes. 

"Here," she says, handing it over, and the boy smiles as he takes it from her.

"Abu will watch over us."

"I'm sure," Yasmin says, rolling her eyes, but the boy is tapping on the side of the sewer.

There is a monkey carved into the wall. Yasmin makes a face as she steps into the deep water, but Regina does not care if it smells, if it clings to her for days, for years, even. As long as Henry is at the other end.

  
  
  
  


 

The tunnel emerges into a fetid pool, spilling between worn buildings, shanties perched on its edge. They climb from the pool onto a ladder that pulls them onto a roof, and then onto the roof of another building, across ledges that the young boy navigates with ease. Regina has to concentrate on her footing to keep up, but she's still trying to look around her, to see anything that is familiar - landmarks, smells, anything that will remind her of the Cordova in her memories. But the slums are hovels stacked on hovels, humans stacked on humans where they sleep on the roofs of this part of the city, or climb the rags hanging from the sides of buildings to get up or down. This is not the Cordova she's seen, and yet...and yet there is a smell here that is familiar to her, warm and deep as the spells her great-grandmother would weave into the night.

“Ali,” the boy says when they come to a final roof, and nods towards a curtained room. “Wait here. Ali is busy tonight.”

Yasmin already seems frustrated with this - Regina noted the younger woman’s clear disgust as they climbed through the sewers, and she’s missed none of the vitriol in her tone whenever Ali is mentioned.

“Is he not ready for us? He knows we are coming. He does this to be rude,” she says, but Regina touches her hand quickly.

“You are not in your spire, Yasmin. This is not your territory.”

“I am in my city, though,” Yasmin hisses back, just in time for the curtain to pull back. A young woman is standing there, pulling down her red hood to reveal a head of thick cropped black hair.

“You’re looking for Ali?” she asks, gnawing on an apple.

“Yes,” Yasmin grits her teeth, nodding. “He is aware of our audience and should be expecting us to--”

“Right,” the girl says, smirking. “Well, time is money. His time is pretty precious lately.”

“What business does he conduct at this time of night?”

“What business do _you_ conduct, princess?”

Yasmin ignores the question, forwning. “When will we speak to him?”

“Now, if you’re done dawdling out here.” The girl steps back behind the curtain, but keeps it open. “Come on, then.”

They step into the empty room, Yasmin’s men surrounding her carefully, Regina at her side. There is a single carpet on the floor, another hanging from the wall, and the mark of the monkey painted on the opposite wall. From the two windows, the palace on the hill glows in full view. Regina’s breath catches at the sight; out of the corner of her eye, she sees Yasmin freeze, gazing on the same thing.

“Nice view, right? Part of the reason I set up here. Keep your friends close, enemies closer, you know how it is.”

Yasmin’s gaze breaks. She looks at the young woman, and Regina can tell that something in her has shifted. Her tone is overly careful. “Where is Ali?”

The other woman leans against the window, smirking. “I think you know.”

“You are Ali.”

The woman spins in place, arms out. “You seem disappointed. Were you expecting someone taller?”

Yasmin snorts. “I was expecting a man.”

“They usually do. It’s a very good disguise, having a reputation. It turns out that it takes no makeup at all.”

“So Ali is a girl.”

“Girl, woman, whatever you want to call me. We are the same age after all.”

A raised eyebrow from Yasmin. “Are we?”

“Supposedly my mother gave birth a few months before the palace lit up in celebration of yours. But who knows if that’s true. Some say street rats are born of mud and dogs with no mother at all. I don’t remember mine. I’ve heard you don’t remember yours either, though. Another thing we have in common, princess.”

Yasmin visibly bristles at this nickname, but keeps her composure. “We are here for the boy and his companions. Henry. We have evidence that he sought your aid.”

“A boy? Named Henry? A name from the Enchanted Forest, is it? Or the Grey Islands, that could be it, too. Well, either way I don’t know him."

“We know he came to the city. I assume you helped him inside. He carried your mark.”

“Many do. The sign of Abu is the symbol of a cause most share in this part of the city. Any street rat could have passed it on to him. I use the term street rat here as an honor, of course. I’m proud of the title.”

Yasmin seems close to losing her patience, and she lets out an angry sigh. “You love to be disrespectful, don’t you?”

Ali’s smile is the picture of placidity. “Who exactly am I disrespecting? No one should be demanding respect in my house.”

Yasmin gestures around them. “You call this a house.”

“We can’t all live in palaces, princess.”

“I live in the desert,” Yasmin counters. “And I am not a princess.”

“In the north, a princess holds a kind of reputation, doesn’t she? And don’t you hold the same one? I could explain, if you need to know more.”

Yasmin rolls her eyes. “I don’t want to hear your explanation.”

Regina steps between the two of them, using her voice reserved for matters of queens. “That’s enough, both of you.” She turns to Ali. “I’m Henry’s mother. Please, he is not prepared for this. I need to find him before something happens."

“He is very prepared, actually,” Ali says, taking the rest of them by surprise. She gives Regina a long look, a mix of sympathy and perhaps a call for understanding. “I have a soft spot for mothers. You should know that when he sought my aid, he’d already planned out everything. He only needed me for entering the city and the tunnels, and I was able to manage that quite easily. The rest he did himself, and I was happy to leave him to it. I think he is capable of pulling it off.”

Regina’s mouth is dry. “Pulling what off?”

“I believe he seeks to assassinate Sofia.”

Regina steadies herself against the wall, suddenly dizzy. “He can’t.”

“I think he can.” Ali touches her arm. “I understand your concern, I do. But he is a man now, and he did not enter into it lightly. I saw his plans. I saw what it is he is doing tonight. He is ready.” She squeezes Regina’s wrist. “I hope that comforts you.”

It’s Yasmin who starts at this, angrily turning on the other girl. “He’s just a boy--”

“No,” Ali says, releasing her grip on Regina and straightening up to face Yasmin. “He is of age, Yasmin. You know this.”

Hani’s arm is on Ali’s shoulder, pushing the young woman towards the wall. “You will address the daughter of the caliph with respect.”

She only smirks at his gesture, rolling her eyes. “There is no caliph.” She looks at Yasmin, and there is a tension there that is hard to completely unwind. “Now you are one of us.”

Hani has not released his grip. “You speak to the rightful heir to Cordova.”

“The heir to what? Cordova does not belong to anyone.”

“How dare you--”

“I starved under the rule of the caliph. Now I starve under the rule of a queen. I don’t condone the inquisition, but you’ll have to forgive a street rat for not seeing much of a difference.”

Yasmin speaks now, her tone changing. “The blood that runs in these streets today, that is not enough of a difference for you?”

The young woman is staring intensely at Yasmin, her expression changed from the playful smirk to something much more serious. “Blood ran here before, but I suppose we’ll have to forgive you for missing it. It was probably difficult to see from behind a palace wall. Anyhow, it would have been a shame to get it on your silk.”

Yasmin frowns, and the expression is tipping towards a sneer. “Is that really how you think of me?”

The young woman snorts. “Oh, I could think much worse, Yasmin. Do you remember what it was like when your father ruled? Or maybe you can’t remember because you never knew.”

“You assume a great deal for a common thief.”

“Maybe. But I will tell you what I know of your father’s rule. The slums doubled in his years, while the richest districts added to their treasuries and made themselves wealthier. The _musha'awith_ were the wealthiest of all. Living in their gilded homes with doors that sang and walls that grew emeralds like vines - but where was their sihr when people starved? They could conjure a feast from thin air, but they watched children waste away to bone in their streets. Those beggars who fell to poverty in his years are mobilized now. Yes, Sofia is a tyrant, and I give my blessing to any industrious young man who seeks to take her life, but she distributes food to the slums. Her missionaries may speak of the devils in sihr, but they carry water and medicine and open their doors to those without a home. I won’t deny that the inquisition has been vicious, but if you saw through the eyes of the poor, you’d see bloated old men who thought only they deserved the fruit of their sihr, and you’d have smiled to see them made to crawl the streets on their hands and knees. You expect me to have sympathy for you and your kind having your lives threatened by another of your standing, but you had no sympathy for the lives that were lost every day in your own city.” Ali leans forward, a fire in her eyes the mirror of Yasmin’s. “Understand me, Yasmin. I do not work to overthrow Sofia for your father. I will take back Cordova for Cordova herself.”

Yasmin stares at the woman. Then, she clears her throat. “So where is the boy?”

“Under the palace gardens by now, I’d say.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“He did not ask me to go with him. He took only three others with him. They asked for my aid in entering the city and gaining access to the tunnels beneath the palace - they did not ask me to enter the palace with them.” Ali looks at Yasmin, and then Regina. “As I said, he is not a child by the measure of Cordova. He is old enough to make his own decisions.”

“If anything happens to him, you will face punishment. I swear it.”

“On whose authority, Yasmin?”

“He is my cousin, Ali. No one harms my blood. Surely even a dog from the slums understands that.”

“We’re all orphans, princess. Your father made sure our mothers died bringing us into this world, or died to put a scrap in our mouth.”

Regina shakes her head, trying to clear it. From deep inside her belly, the magic rises like light, cools her, calms her. She looks at Yasmin, then at Ali.

“I’m going to stop him. I don’t think either one of you will be able to help me if you are at each other’s throats. If you want to come with me, please discontinue bickering. If you’d rather fight, you can stay here.”

  
  
  
  
  


 


	12. ii. brottkvaðning

 

 

 

 

 

“You boys really know how to show a girl a good time, huh?”

A smack to the side of the head from the biggest of the men, a bearded behemoth with shoulders like an ox that Emma has nicknamed Brutus. If it wasn’t for the fact that she’s still bathed in the last dregs of whatever valkyrie magic had her flying across town, she’d be unconscious. Instead, she’s bleeding from multiple lesions in her face, barely able to see out of one eye, and there’s a good chance her nose is never sitting straight again. Elsa can technically fix most of this mess, and considering her level of magic, Emma technically can’t feel it, but she’s pretty sure she looks like hell right now.

She’d do something about the situation if she could, chiefly putting her fist through Brutus’ face and asking him how _he_ enjoyed the sensation, but there’s two problems with that:

One, the magic is just enough to keep her from feeling too much pain, but not enough to do anything else. Not feeling a sledgehammer’s worth of misery is ideal at this time, so she’s not complaining yet.

The other major problem is that whatever rope they tied around her neck once they’d dragged her to this longhouse seems to be draining any effort at powering up. The second the noose was tightened, she felt most of her actionable magic leaving her, put on hold by something outside of her control. Not good. Not good at all. So she’ll take the magical narcotics for now, and go valkyrie on his ass later, once this rope gets off her. And maybe once he unties her hands, too, but she thinks her foot can ruin his day nearly as effectively.

“Speak,” Brutus barks. His knuckles are sprayed red with her blood.

“I’ve _been_ speaking,” she says, inhaling through her teeth and then spitting out a gob of blood and saliva and god knows what else. She’s grateful she hasn’t lost a tooth yet, though Brutus is certainly making no promises when it comes to her smile. “Not much of a listener, are you?”

“Answer me, _bikkja_.”

She peers up at him through her right eye, her left so swollen that it forces her to squint. “I forgot the question.”

Another smack, this time to her jaw. She tastes blood - fresher than the blood that is already catching on her lip from where it pours down the side of her face - as she bites the edge of her tongue on impact.

“Yep,” she says, grateful as ever for the numbing power of being a superhuman savior...for the time being. “That’s definitely the way to make me remember.”

Brutus wipes the sweat from his blood-splattered face before lifting his hand up again, prepared for another strike. “Where is _Urðarbrunnr?”_

“Which part of ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’ did you not understand the first nine times, Brutus?”

He roars, yanking that massive arm back for what is sure to be a new record in face-smacks, but someone has come into the room, and Brutus halts, mouth creasing in confusion. Another one of the jarl’s men, this one looking like he’s in a hurry, is shouting in a Heimili dialect Emma can barely catch, something about the jarl and a word that sounds a little like the word for ‘stop’ - Emma is familiar with that one because it’s what Anna yells before she drops an eel down the back of her tunic. Brutus argues with him briefly, grunts in what is clearly frustration, and then yanks Emma up from where he’s had her tied to the wall. She chokes momentarily with the motion, then stands quickly enough to prevent him from strangling her.

“Come,” he barks. “Now.”

“Since you asked so nicely,” she gets in, just before he’s dragging her out of the longhouse and into the grey light of dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

Anna is sitting in the grass between a few other of the jarl’s men, hands and legs tied, on a similar leash to Emma’s - though hers isn’t glowing, which probably means Emma’s been outfitted with hers specifically to curb some of her powers. Brutus kicks Emma in the back to get her on her knees, where she collapses next to Anna.

“Hey Carrots,” she wheezes, smirking up at the shieldmaiden with one eye half-closed. “Long time, no see.” She smacks her lips, tasting iron. “I see they also decided to take you in for some light torture.”

Anna looks down at her, blood in the corner of her mouth not dissimilar to the first time they met, though now she is without her shield or weapons, and the displeasure she’s showing has nothing to do with having to retrieve a supposed valkyrie from another world. This time she only frowns for a minute before chuckling, grinning crookedly.

“You look like _skíta_.”

“You’re not exactly the belle of the ball either,” Emma says, attempting to sit up despite her hands being tied. “What’d they smack you around about?”

“I do not know. They asked me of your origin.” Anna grins. “I said nothing. I told them to try harder. They gave up.”

Emma’s chest swells with her usual affection for the shieldmaiden, battered as usual in the name of their bond. “My sister from another mister.” She looks around. “Any sign of your real sister?”

“I have heard no mention of her. I hope that means she is still safe.”

“Perfect, she can swoop in and freeze all these bastards.” Emma coughs, spitting out more blood. Anna raises an eyebrow where it hits the ground. “Don’t worry,” Emma says. “Can’t feel a thing. Apparently this new valkyrie level I’m on functions like extra strength magic ibuprofen. Elsa’s got her work cut out for her, though. I’m pretty sure my nose is broken. Think it’ll make me look tough?”

Anna shakes her head, rolling her eyes. “Only Valkyrja would smile through such trials.”

“What can I say, I’m a tough warrior chick.”

“You are afraid of spiders.”

“Am not.”

“You cried like a helpless child when it fell on your pillow. Your cry was the cry of an infant in the cradle, weak and feeble.”

“Not how I remember it, but whatever.” She lowers her voice, nodding subtly at the feet of her former Smacker in Chief. “Brutus over there was quizzing me about something called _Urðarbrunnr.”_

Anna’s smirk disappears. She frowns, glancing between Emma and their captors. “What did he wish to know?”

“I guess he’s trying to find it, because he kept asking me where it was. I don’t think he believed me when I said I had no idea, or else I wouldn’t currently look like hamburger meat.”

“It is a well,” Anna whispers, leaning as close to Emma as she can despite their current tethers.

“A well? As in what you dig to get water from?” Emma snorts. “So I got my face smashed in for a hole in the ground.”

“Not any ordinary hole.”

“That’s what she said.”

“You are bleeding from most of your face, Vargdropi.”

“I literally can’t feel a thing. Allow me my jokes.”

Anna rolls her eyes, but keeps her voice low, her tone changing. “ _Urðarbrunnr_ is the well where _Yggdrasill_ grows.”

“I love how you always say these things like I’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.”

Anna snorts. “You do the same with your epics of Vanderpump and Stassi of the Sur Clan.”

“Fine, fine. Tell me more about this well.”

“ _Urðarbrunnr_ is the well from which the great tree grows. It is the source of...it is hard to say in your tongue. You would call it destiny, I believe. The norns live there, and choose our fates, and set them into motion. All seiðr flows from its source.” She pauses, remembering something, and then adds: “Two swans live in its waters.”

“Not a coincidence, I bet.” Emma falls back onto her elbows, still pressed close from where her wrists are tied behind her back. “Nothing is a coincidence over here.” She sighs. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

Anna gives her a look, but she knows who Emma is referring to regardless. “They let him go.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shrugs, dried blood creasing along her cheek. “I do not believe they hold us because of the undead. I believe this is about the alehouse.”

“All of this is because one guy got shoved through _one_ wall?” If Emma could cross her arms, she would. “Never say your people aren’t prone to overreacting, Carrots.”

“Seiðr is strong here, but it is not _that_ strong. They will not have seen power like yours in many seasons. They will need to know its source.”

“So where does the well factor into this?”

Anna frowns. “That I do not know. But it does not bode well.”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

Emma pricks her ears at the sound of horses, Anna already swerving her head in the same direction. A group of riders have appeared, and there’s no question that one of the occupants of a smaller horse has the same ice-white hair and bright tunic of a certain missing vulva.

“It’s Elsa,” Anna says, and there’s something to her tone, probably to do with the man on the horse besides Elsa’s - his mustache is longer than any Emma’s ever seen, braided and beaded with silver, his balding head still graced with a few shoulder length strands. He is dressed in the garb of a jarl, which means if she was a betting woman, she’d say this is -

“The Weasel,” comes the grunt of confirmation from her companion. The horses slow in front of them, but no one gets down. Emma tries to make eye contact with Elsa, but she’s staring at the horizon instead, her expression unreadable.

“Welcome,” says the mustached man, arms spreading under his furs. “Your ordeal is done. Now that your penance is paid, you may enter my house as a guest.” He looks at Anna. “Anna Agnarrsdóttir. You are welcome in my house and my hall.”

Anna says nothing. Emma does not miss that Elsa is giving her a look, and that Anna finally nods after what seems like a long minute of inner debate, her teeth making her bottom lip white. Yep, this is definitely the guy that murdered her parents, and the guy that Anna would like to decapitate. And, considering he’s now confirmed that he is responsible for Emma currently looking like a trampled sausage, she’s pretty sure she’d be an enthusiastic aid in said decapitation.

But Elsa’s there, and she remembers everything that was said about the duty of her calling, and she knows there’s more at stake. For now.

“Svanhvít.”

She looks up at the sound of her more official title. Emma can only see him through one eye, but he’s staring her down, and some of his men have jumped to attention too, apparently unaware a legend was in their midst. She gives him an unimpressed eyebrow raise. “Yeah?”

“So it is true, then. You have returned to our world as it was foretold.”

“Apparently.” Emma nods at the binding around her wrists. “When are these coming off?”

The Weasel smirks. “Now, if you’d like.”

“I would have liked it about twelve hours ago, but thanks, better late than never.”

“It is done.”

The Weasel gestures and one of his men is untying Emma’s bindings, pulling her to her feet. The release of the rope brings a flash of magic back into her system, and she can feel the slow throb as it returns, only to her extremities for now. She wiggles her fingers, squinting, and points at Anna. “Hers too.”

“Of course.” The Weasel looks unperturbed by all of this. “There is no debt between us now. You may enter my hall today as my guest. You will find your things have already been brought to Elsa’s quarters. Elsa, they will stay with you.”

Elsa nods, still silent.

“Come,” he says, mustaches swinging as he turns the horse around. “Let us return to my hall.”

“Your hall,” Anna mutters under her breath, just loud enough for only Emma to hear.

“That was easy, right?” Emma whispers, eyebrow raised.

Anna is still grimacing as they begin their trudge behind the horses, jarl’s men on every side of them. “Too easy.”

  
  


 

 

The land that once belonged to Anna and Elsa’s family is as beautiful as they’d described - that’s probably what gets to Emma first. That and the sight of tears in Anna’s eyes, something rarer than a heatwave in these parts, as they crest the hill and the town comes into sight. Emma nudges her companion, giving her a reassuring smile, but Anna only wipes at her face, head down, and then resumes her stares of steel.

“Arnardalr,” Anna says under her breath, just once. It is indeed perched on the edge of a fjord so blue it almost hurts to look at, huge green and grey cliffs crowding around the cluster of buildings, a massive longhouse at its center.

The townspeople emerge only briefly to look at those who have returned with their jarl, but at the sight of Anna and Elsa, it’s clear that they are required to look away. Emma notices that it’s with regret, too, their expressions not hiding that this is done in tradition, not with great enthusiasm.

The jarl’s longhouse is massive, the largest Emma’s ever been in since she ended up in Heimili. Of course, no one’s about to give them a tour. Elsa silently takes the two of them to a room at the far end, a small set of quarters with two beds covered in furs, and shuts the door behind them.

The moment the door closes, Anna has turned on her sister, hissing a stream of words in Heimili that Emma can barely catch, words she’s never heard her use before. Elsa says nothing for a moment, letting her sister finish, and then shakes her head, frowning.

Anna sighs, her shoulders heaving, and then collapses onto one of the beds.

“Uh,” Emma looks between the two of them, and then settles her gaze on the elder sister, still a mystery. “Hi Elsa.”

“Hello Emma,” Elsa says, her frown from Anna’s words still there.

“I’ll be honest, I’m going to need an explanation.”

“I would ask for one in return, but I have been filled in since arriving here.”

“When was that?”

“This morning, when I awoke to a ring of jarl’s men around my tree. They brought me to this hall and then brought me to you.”

“No offense, but I wasn’t expecting you to show up with the Weasel.”

Elsa’s face twists into a less readable expression. “I have pledged my services to him for now, Emma. This is my duty.” She squints at Emma’s face. “You’ll need me to start healing you now if you want to look half-normal by sundown. Sit.”

Emma obeys, dropping into the only chair. “I haven’t been in front of a mirror yet, but I’m gonna assume I look worse than I feel.”

“What did you do?”

“What did _I_ do? How about you ask the jarl’s fellas what they did? Way to assume I was asking for it, Elsa.”

“You are fortunate that you have so much seiðr,” Elsa says, her palm sheening over with frost before she applies it to Emma’s cheek. “Otherwise you’d be unconscious from the pain. I can’t imagine what provoked them to make such a mess of you.”

“What, this?” She points to her left eye, currently swollen shut, and grins. “I got this for good behavior.”

Anna sighs, rubbing at her own face, her lip fat where it’s been split. Her sister has yet to heal it, and if Emma knows the shieldmaiden, she has a feeling Carrots will insist on keeping the wound for the scar. “She was being difficult.”

“Was I mouthy? Perhaps. Did they deserve a verbal smackdown? Yes.”

“Hold still,” Elsa says, gripping her head more firmly. “The jarl told me what happened at the alehouse. Your punishment serves the trouble caused, in his eye at least.”

“I only knocked one guy through the side of a house, okay? The rest is on Anna’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Hans?”

“Yeah, Hans. Ol’ flame zombie with the hovercraft. Any of the jarl’s men spend last night knocking him around in a longhouse, too? Because otherwise this is just plain unfair.”

“He was not captured.”

“Oh, perfect. Glad to know he’s evaded justice again. Regular fucking Duke of Hazzard.”

“You have served your punishment for the alehouse. He will serve his when they find him.”

“ _If_ they find him. In case they haven’t noticed, he’s some kind of undead wizard, so that’ll be a fun time.” She lowers her voice. “Look, I heard nothing about what happened last night, except for a few quick words about me being a valkyrie. That wasn’t the reason they interrogated us. They’re looking for _Urðarbrunnr.”_

“ _Urðarbrunnr.”_ Elsa blinks. “You’re sure?”

“It’s hard to forget the word when they keep repeating it right before they smack you in the face.”

“The jarl did not mention this.”

“You think? You’re the one who told me he’s literally called the Weasel. I don’t know if this whole thing was a set-up, but there’s something very fishy going on.”

A sigh from the bed, Anna’s black and blue head lifting with a smile. “I would eat many fish right now.”

“Why would they want to get to this place? It’s a well, right? What’s supposed to happen?”

“I do not know. Perhaps they seek an audience with the norns, to alter destiny itself.”

“No way that can go wrong.”

“There is no water that is more sacred than that of the well.” Elsa shakes her head. “But no mortal could ever…” Her eyes fall on Emma. “Oh.”

Anna’s looking up from her cot, too, making a face. The sisters share a look.

“Hey,” Emma says, getting to her feet. “Wait a second. ‘Oh’, what? What does ‘oh’ mean?”

“No mortal can enter the well.”

“I may be a valkyrie, Elsa, but last time I checked I could definitely get killed.”

“No, Emma, not you.” Elsa touches her hand. “Your daughter.”

“You’re kidding.”

“We know that seiðr is leaving our world. Your daughter will return it to us. The well is the source of all seiðr. This must be how he’s come to such a conclusion.”

“Sounds like a leap to me.”

Elsa makes a face. “You underestimate him. The jarl is well-versed in the ways of seiðr. He is not skilled, but he is knowledgeable. Sometimes that is more dangerous.”

“My daughter isn’t immortal, though.” She pauses, half-panicking. “Wait, is she? Count on Regina and I to accidentally make a bulletproof kid who can walk through universes or whatever.”

“She is a being of immense power, more so than you or I. If she can be killed…” Elsa seems hesitant to answer. “This I do not know.” She pats Emma’s hand when she sees her expression. “Genuinely.” Elsa presses another healing hand into the other side of her face. “The jarl wishes for me to divine for him today. It is difficult to know what he wants, only that I am meant to look into the future to aid him in deciding how to proceed as a jarl. Anna has seen this before, but Emma, whatever happens-”

A knock on the door, heavy and insistent. Elsa gives them a look before getting to her feet. When she opens it, one of the jarl’s men is there, nearly as wide as the door itself.

“You are summoned,” he says, and Elsa nods. “Come now.”

“So polite,” Emma says, yanking Anna to her feet, her face only half-healed so now she can only slightly see from both eyes. “Honestly, it’s just non-stop manners from these boys.”

  


 

 

In the center of the jarl’s hall, a smaller, more rustic-looking throne has been placed in the center of the room, opposite where the Weasel currently sits, stroking his mustache. Anna and Emma are crowded against the wall with the other onlookers of the court, surely interested in the spectacle of a true vǫlva’s presence.

Elsa has stepped towards the chair, seemingly unaware of any of them.

“You are about to see what it is my sister does when she is not stewing in our hut,” Anna says, lowering her voice. “She will need assistance from a girl the jarl chooses.”

As if on cue, the Weasel sweeps a hand in the direction of the servants gathered before him - well, servant is a word Emma knows doesn’t quite apply here, as she’s figured out that Heimili’s rules on lifetime bondage are a little less evolved than other places - and points.

“My _þræll,_ ” he says, and a girl with wild red hair is stepping forward, blue tattoos in markings Emma hasn’t seen before covering every inch of her in swirls and knots and strange designs. She looks at Elsa in a way that may be slightly resentful, and then goes to the work of gathering the right things from the supplies Elsa has previously piled before her.

Elsa lifts one of the pouches usually hanging from her belt, and pulls out a single seed, holding it between her fingers for the rest to see before placing it in her mouth and chewing it thoughtfully.

“Bil,” Anna whispers. “It gives her visions.”

“Drugs,” Emma says, nodding. “Got it.”

The redhead catches Elsa as she falls back into the chair, lowering her carefully onto the seat. Anna seems unmoved by the fact her sister has begun to convulse, the air in the room going still and heavy, but Emma can admit she’s a little disturbed by the sight of someone so familiar violently twitching into impossible shapes.

The redhead has a silver chalice filled with water now, and she kneels in front of Elsa with the chalice lifted, somehow avoiding it being knocked over by Elsa’s convulsions. Then, she is still, and her head drops forward, locks of ice-white hair falling around the chalice, nose nearly touching its rim.

“She must look into the water to open the gate to her visions.” Anna crosses her arms. “It can be difficult at first.”

Emma raises an eyebrow. “To look into water?”

But she immediately has her answer. Elsa’s head has shot back, her entire body going stiff. It is floating slightly in the center of the room, snow in a dark flurry around her. The redhead covers her face with one arm as frost forms. Emma shoots a look up at the Weasel; he is on the edge of his seat, watching intently.

Elsa’s body remains like this for many breathless minutes more, the snow unceasing, the hall freezing, the spectators’ breaths pooling around them. Emma keeps looking at Anna for reassurance, but apparently this is not out of the ordinary. Finally, with what seems like impossible difficulty, Elsa’s fingers wiggle, her head swivels as she stretches, and she returns to the ground, landing in her chair. She opens her eyes, frost cracking on her face as she does so, and looks into the chalice.

A voice, not her own, something more deep and ancient, something that, quite honestly, scares Emma a little, rises from Elsa’s throat.

It is in a dialect of Heimili that she cannot understand, if it is from Heimili at all. Anna’s brow is furrowed now.

“What is she saying?” Emma whispers, but Anna shakes her head.

“It is in an ancient tongue. Hard for me to follow.”

“Better you than me.”

Anna raises an eyebrow. “I believe...she is repeating the prophecy of your daughter.”

“But we already know that one.”

“Yes, but--” Anna’s eyes suddenly go wide as Elsa’s voice deepens, speaking faster in that same strange tongue. “There is more.”

Emma is already cold, but now her stomach has dropped out. “What?”

“I don’t understand either. I have never heard this part of the prophecy before.”

“Wait, what? Dude, _translate_.”

Anna shakes her head again. “I can’t, it is too fast now. Let me listen and I will-”

Suddenly there is a word Emma _does_ understand. Elsa has said _Urðarbrunnr._

The jarl stands, stepping forward from his throne. Emma stares frantically between him and Elsa, something about the way his brow is furrowed, his eyes widened at the same word, telling her that it is time to panic.

Elsa continues in that same deep, frightening voice, and then stops. Her head goes slack again, her chin dropping to her chest. The redhead wipes snow from her own hair and reluctantly shifts in place, setting the chalice to the side.

“It is done,” Anna breathes, and Emma can see her shoulders rising with the effort, her knuckles white at her sides. Something Elsa’s said has shaken her, too.

The other occupants of the hall seem to relax as the redhead has gotten to her feet, beginning to clean up the ring of snow and ash around the chair, and there are small murmurs, a few laughs of relief at the end of all this intensity.

The jarl returns to his seat, his face shifting into an easy smile, hand raised to those in his hall.

“Well,” he announces, laughing. “A true vǫlva is among us, indeed. Let none question that she-”

Elsa’s head shoots back up, an unnatural gesture. Her eyes have sheened over with frost again as she opens her mouth, the expression on her face strange, frightened. The jarl falls silent, looking confused.

“Emma?”

Emma’s mouth is dry. She grabs Anna’s wrist, because otherwise she’ll fall to the ground, otherwise the world will drop out beneath her and it’ll all be over. Anna looks over at her in confusion.

It’s Regina’s voice. Regina’s voice coming from Elsa, but it’s Regina, there is no question in her mind.

“Emma, can you hear me?” Elsa is twisting in her chair as if seeking her out, looking frantically around the hall with those bright white eyes, unseeing, and yet when her gaze falls on Emma, her face contorts into instant relief, and she lets out a single dry sob, still in Regina’s voice, still unmistakeable. “Oh god, it’s you. It’s really you.” Her emotions turn to something like desperation - it has been a long time since Emma has heard that tone from her, even if it’s coming from the body of a waifish viking witch. “Emma, please, you have to come to Cordova. Henry is in danger, we _need_ you. You have to come immediately, there isn’t enough time. I’m...I’m cornered.” Elsa’s face, still masked in one of Regina’s familiar expressions twists momentarily, and her head switches around as if there is something behind her, panic in her furrowed brow. “I don’t know how much longer I can talk to you like this, they’re looking for us now.”

“Regina,” Emma starts, pushing her way past the other onlookers, coming to stand in front of Elsa, dropping to her knees to grasp her hands. “Regina, I can hear you, it’s me.”

Elsa smiles again, tears filling her eyes. “I love you,” Regina says, her voice choked with emotion.

“I love you, too,” Emma says, trembling. “I’m coming for you, okay?”

Elsa looks over her shoulder again, this time with more fear. “Come as soon as you can, there isn’t-”

But Elsa’s eyes close, and she slumps down in the throne.

“Regina?” Emma squeezes Elsa’s hands, giving them a gentle shake. “Regina, are you there?”

Elsa opens her eyes, now back to her normal voice, her expression one that is patently Elsa’s own. “Emma?” She looks worried.

But Emma is already on her feet, racing out of the hall and back towards her quarters to fetch her things.

She is on her way to Cordova, wherever that is, and there is nothing on any version of this godforsaken planet that can stop her.

  
  


 

 

Except for the shieldmaiden hot on her tail, who slams the door of Elsa’s room shut behind them and grabs Emma’s shoulder just as she’s throwing her things back into her sack.

“Emma,” Anna says, tone firm. “Emma, we must discuss this.”

“You know how my future self told me to stay put until I had a sign? I’m pretty sure that was a giant neon sign. I need to be on a horse, like, yesterday.” She pauses in packing, momentarily distracted. “Where _is_ Cordova anyway? South of us, right?”

“A decent journey, _but_ ,” Anna tightens her grip on Emma’s shoulder. “We must prepare first.”

She brushes her off, dropping another leather bag of this or that into her pack. “Yeah, I don’t have time for that. This is a ‘phone, keys, wallet’ situation, except in this case it’s ‘sword, armor, horse’. Or could I fly? Maybe I’ll fly.”

“Emma.” Now Elsa has burst through the door, looking weakened from the previous display. “There is more to the prophecy. To save the world, you must place your daughter in the--”

“Got it, more prophecy nonsense. We can talk about it on the way.”

Elsa breathes out. “On the way?”

“She is going to Cordova,” Anna says, making a face at her sister as if begging for some support on this particular issue. “I have told her, preparations must be made. She will be dead in a ditch if she leaves like this.”

Elsa nods. “Emma, this is very serious.”

“Right, and so was that distress call. If you guys aren’t coming with me, that’s fine. I will literally crawl there on my hands and knees by my lonesome at this point, so--”

“We would never abandon you,” Anna says, looking insulted. “I only suggest we plan the route and what it requires so you are not a starving vargdropi with no horse in five days.” She smirks. “You have spilled blood for me. I have spilled blood for you. Of course we will go with you.”

Elsa gives her sister a look. “Anna,” she starts, and Anna takes a second to come around, scowling when she realizes.

“You would choose aiding the Weasel over rescuing the mother of the Shatterer of Spears?” Anna spits onto the floor. Emma steps back, never having seen the shieldmaiden like this and not sure she wants to get in between her and wherever this is going.

Elsa’s face is ice white, her expression stonier than ever. “You know of my duty.”

“Your duty was to our family above all. We should have come back for his head, tradition be damned.”

Elsa’s hands are in fists at her sides, but Emma does not miss that they are sheening over with frost. “My duty is to the will of seiðr--”

“There will be no seiðr if she dies.” Anna steps towards her sister, her cheeks a brilliant red beneath her freckles. “Do not make this mistake again. You chose seiðr before, but--”

“Seiðr chose _me_.” Elsa roars, ice pooling at her feet. “I have never had a choice, Anna. Not once. Not ever. Don’t you dare tell me I abandoned our family. Do not ever assume I do this because it is what I want. If seiðr could leave this world and rid me of this burden without dying at its heart, I would let it. Some days I think I would let the world die regardless, just to feel it drain from me.”

Anna is silent, breathing heavy. Then she shakes her head, picks up her shield, and pulls it onto her back.

“Then I will go with Emma,” she says. “You will honor your duty, and I will honor mine.”

  
  


 

 

But it’s one thing to decide you’re running off to Cordova to save the love of your life, and another thing entirely to leave the building you’re in. Yes, the very first step. Leaving the building. It’s really that hard.

Particularly when a jarl and his men are standing between you and the door.

“You said there was no issue here anymore,” Emma is saying, arms crossed. “I paid my debt, so did she. Let us leave.”

The Weasel is smirking the way he’s been since he showed up, far too sure of himself and seemingly one step ahead. Emma doesn’t like that one bit. “I cannot do that, Svanhvít.”

“Sure you can,” Emma says, gesturing to the door behind him. “Either you’re opening it the nice way or I’m knocking it down, understand?”

“I require the Walker Between Worlds.”

“The what now?” Emma raises an eyebrow. “Oh, my _kid_? Where do you think I’m hiding her?”

The Weasel continues smirking, eyeing her. Anna gives Emma a look, and Emma glances down at herself, only to burst into laughter.

“Wait, really?” She points at her own middle. “You think…? Oh, sweetie, no.”

“So she will be born in Cordova, then.” The Weasel thinks for a minute, then smiles wider. “I will assemble my men for the journey south.”

“You think you’re coming with us now?”

“No, Svanhvít. I will not be coming with you. I have no use for you or your companion if you do not carry the Shatterer of Spears. So, I will kill you.”

Emma blinks. She gives Anna a ‘can you believe this guy’ look and unsheaths her sword.

“Well, okay. Good luck with that.”

The jarl’s men step forward, circling the two of them with their weapons drawn.

“Do you guys want to take this outside?” Emma quips, swinging her sword a few times to loosen up. “I don’t want to mess up the decor in here.”

Three of them try to take her at once, but she’s fast, and Anna’s fast, and quite frankly, these boys are about as effective as they were at the alehouse. But they’re vastly outnumbered and the hall of the jarl made entirely from wood is not the place to use your potent but highly flammable fire magic on passersby. So she’s dodging carefully, making sure there’s no way to get cornered, and elbowing her way towards the Weasel, who appears to be attempting to calmly escape the fight.

Fat chance of that, she thinks, swinging her way towards him, but someone’s gotten there first. A blur of red and blue has just launched itself onto the Weasel’s side, and before Emma can do much about it, the Weasel’s got a dagger in his neck, falling to the ground with a spray of blood, and a redhead with a face of blue tattoos is staring over him, wiping his life from her face. She looks up at Emma, nods, and heads up to the throne on the other end of the room. Emma follows her, downing two men in the process, watching as the girl rummages through a chest, yanks out a bow and arrow, and then stands on the throne as she mercilessly shoots five men in fifteen seconds. Even Anna spins to gape at the situation, groaning loudly when a man she is about to kill is instead skewered through the head by an arrow.

When the last man falls to the ground, Emma lets out a long breath, looking at Anna, who is sheathing her sword, panting. The other redhead is stepping gingerly among the bodies, recovering her arrows as if this was the equivalent of a PE class, nothing too exciting.

“You know, they probably had a good point in locking us up last night,” Emma says. “We turned out to be kind of a big danger.” Anna rolls her eyes.

“There will be more,” she says, nodding at the door. “We must move, but first I need to find--”

Always on cue, Elsa bursts into the hall, two of the jarl’s men behind her. She sends a spike of ice over her shoulder. “I will meet you on the rise above the fjord!” she yells, her ice impacting with a wet thud into one of the men. “Go! I will hold them back!”

Anna seems torn, but Emma yanks her towards the door. The servant girl with the bow and arrows looks at her expectantly, but Emma gestures to her.

“You heard her,” she says, racing towards the gates of the town once they’re outside. “Top of the fjord, stat.”

  
  


 

 

Emma is grateful for all those ridiculous viking obstacle courses that Carrots was so set on during her training. Once she’s racing up the side of the cliffs, arrows occasionally whizzing past her face, a screaming man or two swinging a sword at her ankles as she goes, she’s happy that her system is used to this level of very specific cardio. When it seems like they’ve finally outrun the last of the men on their tail, Emma slows in a grove of birches near the top of the hill, hands on her knees as she catches her breath.

“I think we lost them,” she pants, and Anna nods, nearly collapsing beside her. The redheaded servant girl has climbed a tree just on the periphery of the grove, and Emma cocks her head to look up at her, squinting.

“Hey,” she says, hands on her hips. “What’s your deal?”

The girl stares back in silence, wind whipping her red hair away from her face and revealing the series of blue tattoos there that are even more intense up close.

“She is Pictish,” Anna whispers, elbow in Emma’s side. “They are as trustworthy as an eel.”

“Joke’s on you because I know for a fact you love eels.”

“I will eat an eel. I will not fight alongside it.”

Emma waves her off, turning back to the ginger in the tree. “My name’s Emma. My intimidating companion here is Anna. You put up a heck of a fight back there.”

Still nothing from the girl.

“I’m not super familiar with, uh, whatever bonds tied you to the Weasel, but you’re free now.”

Silence.

“That means you can do whatever you want. Head for the beach, go to college, open a Dunkin Donuts franchise. The world is your oyster.” She glances at Anna, who looks unimpressed with the picture of freedom she’s painting. “Tough crowd, huh?”

“You are wasting your time,” Anna says, arms crossed.

“Or,” Emma addresses the girl again, who still has not moved from the tree. “You can join our motley crew.” The very hard elbow of a shieldmaiden goes flying into her side. “Anna here’s the tank. Elsa does some mean magic. I’m kind of the, uh...rogue. The comic relief of the operation, if you will. We have room for an archer, especially one that shoots like you.”

Anna rolls her eyes. “What did I just tell you?”

Emma turns on her, voice lowering to an irritated groan. “You know what I’ve figured out about this world? You may believe in magic and fairies and world-altering prophecies, but you guys are pretty fucking narrow-minded, you know that? I don’t care if she’s Pictish or part-mermaid or is a gosh darn figment of our imaginations. We could not have won that fight without her. She saved _both_ of our asses, and she deserves a slot.”

Anna throws up her hands. “We are not looking for volunteers.”

“Well, that was before a jarl decided to set his entire army on us. Last time I checked, we need all the help we can get. There’s no way we’re making it all the way to Cordova on our own.”

As if on cue, a straggler emerges from the forest, wounded but still moving fast, his sword raised. Anna’s quick to pull out her sword, but it turns out the girl in the tree is quicker, and there’s an arrow right through the man’s head before she can get a swing in. He falls to the ground, and Anna and Emma stare down at him, all of it done in less than a second.

“I’m Maighread,” the girl says, her accent recognizable as something close to what Emma might identify as Scottish. “That’s the last time I save ye fer today.”

Emma pulls an arrow from the eye socket of the man, his eyeball coming along with an audible pop.

“Sheesh,” Emma says, staring at the skewered eyeball, which is staring back at her from arrow kebab. “She is a damn good shot.”

Anna makes a noise that might be disapproval, snatching the arrow from her hands and scowling as she tosses it over her shoulder. “Or it was luck.”

As if to answer, another arrow zings past Anna’s cheek, nailing one of her now-severed braids to the nearest stump. Emma and Anna spin to stare at the ginger in her perch, mouths agape, Anna’s hand going up to the shortened braid. Maighread shrugs and gracefully leaps to the ground. Emma grins in spite of herself.

“Oh, she is _definitely_ coming with us.”

“I’ll come with ye,” Maighread says, brushing off her knees. “But ye will dae me a favor in return, ye ken?”

“Uh, sure. I think.”

“When the Weasel kidnapped me, he took something ae mine and I need it back. He took my bear.”

“Your beer?”

“My _bear_.” The redhead stretches her arms as wide as they go. “Fucking massive, brown, covered in fur? I rode her in battle with my clan. Weasel keeps her chained in his stable. Ye’ll help me get her back or I’ll nae go with ye, it’s simple as that.”

Emma’s jaw drops, gesturing over her shoulder. “Back where we just came from? For a...a bear, you say? You’re sure? A bear. You ride a...bear?”

“Aye, I ride a bear. Like ye’d ride a warhorse.” Maighread puts her hands on her hips, making a face. “She’s near indestructible and eats her weight a day in grown men, how’s that fer ye?”

It’s Anna who grabs Emma’s arm, hissing in her ear excitedly. “We need the bear. I must fight alongside the warrior bear mount. It would be a great and very rare honor.”

Emma throws up her hands. “Alright, alright. We’re going back to the place we just escaped from to go get a giant bear to be her horse. Fine. _Fine._ Let’s do it.”

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
